Past Perfect (13 page)

“I appreciate it. I’ll get it now.”

“The only reason I interrupted you was that he said you told him to call you.” She had all the makings of a great line producer, which no doubt she would be if she could learn to restrain her congenital courtesy.

“Thanks!”

“Otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered you.”

“I appreciate it, Toni.”

I went back into my office, plugged the jack back into the phone, then fumbled picking up the receiver. It went flying across my desk and just missed knocking over a picture of Adam right beside Hsing Hsing, the first male giant panda at the National Zoo.

Huff didn’t bother with hello. “I got a new cell phone number for that person. It turned out to be at her address, but under a made-up business name.” He spoke as if every word were a thousand bucks deducted from his Agency pension.

“Thanks!” Since he didn’t say “you’re welcome,” I added, “I’m sure it wasn’t easy to get. I really appreciate it.”

“Yeah.”

I wrote the number down—202, the Washington area code. “While I have you on the phone …” I said. I heard a rush of air that sounded like a snort being pushed through a hairy nose, but he didn’t say anything. “I have one more favor to ask. Could you try to get me the name of someone — not in the Agency anymore — who has some expertise on what was going on” —I couldn’t believe I was asking this —“in eighty-eight or eighty-nine in East Germany, when the Soviet Union pulled out its troops and things started falling apart? Obviously, I’m not talking about classified stuff or anything. I just need someone knowledgeable.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“I would be very grateful.” That meant that the next time Huff asked Oliver to up his consulting fee, I’d have to behave in a way that would make ethicists gag, like saying, Oh, Oliver, Huff is worth every cent of what he’s asking for and more.

“But let me tell you ahead of time,” Huff added, “I’m highly dubious it can be done.” Then, this obviously being my day for getting hung up on by former employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, he was gone.

Associating Huff and Ben in my head brought on a new thought. Huff had already provided me with information. Ben at least appeared to be willing to try to help me. About those two being helpful: if what got me fired was a massive error of judgment on my part, they would know about it and keep their distance. No help for a fuckup. Likewise, if the word on me was that I had betrayed my country or I was a security risk —keeping bad company, going off the edge mentally, running up debt —Ben would have known about it. He’d been my boss. Not only would he not have offered to try to help me, he wouldn’t have taken my call today in the first place. As for Huff, he might not know the precise reason I was fired, but even before he took the consulting job with Spy Guys, he would have checked me out to see if I was okay to work with.

At that moment, I wished I had taken the logic course I’d considered for three seconds in junior year and then decided was too hard. Trying to be as lucid as possible, I concluded that if both Ben and Huff were now willing to deal with me, then the basis for my having been fired was not that I had been accused of some grave crime or character flaw. In other words, the Agency had let me go and destroyed my chances of getting another job for a reason that had been good enough for them. But it wasn’t good enough for me.

My sister once called espionage novels “romantic pap, including Le Carré,” though to be fair, which I rarely was when it came to her, she’d made the remark before I wrote Spy Guys. Long before scum became a popular word for lowlifes, Maddy had used that word to refer to the people who worked for the CIA, and that was after I joined the Agency.

But I felt pretty smart espionagewise. Having been trained by fiction and honed by my CIA tenure, I hadn’t been calling any of the phone numbers for Lisa from my cell or from the office. This time, when I drove back to Manhattan, I double-parked my car in front of a Korean market on Third Avenue and used a pay phone. When I dialed the new number Huff had given me, it went right to voice mail. Not Lisa’s own unmistakable voice squeaking she wasn’t there: the same canned message announcing that the person whose phone this was wasn’t taking calls. I could leave a message including the date and time I’d called. This time I decided to speak: “Hi! You said you’d get back to me. This is your friend from the old days. I’d love to hear from you, just to know if everything’s okay and if I can do anything to help.” For a nanosecond, the words I’m here for you passed through my brain, but my lips refused to have any part of it. So like the two CIA veterans I’d spoken to that day, I just hung up.

My mind wandered back, but not too far: to just hours earlier, late morning. While rehearsing my call to Ben, I had given a half minute’s thought to explaining to him that my strongest connection to Lisa at the Agency had been that report I’d written about the three East Germans we’d brought over—including the Manfred Gottesman who had settled in Cincinnati and presumably become Dick Schroeder.

The three were brought here shortly after the opening of the

Berlin Wall, when there was panic among the recently powerful in East Germany. At the Agency, we heard about the mass shredding of files. Not long after, when shredding clearly became too monumental a task, Stasi officials began building bonfires of documents. Meanwhile, most of Europe and the United States were jubilant about the downfall of the oppressive government. But some in my unit, Ben included, couldn’t accept that it had actually come to pass. I recalled one analyst who had quoted Ben as declaring, “They’ll be back.” The people in the unit who had predicted the rapid crumbling of the East German regime alternated between private delight at their colleagues’ discomfort and off-the-record See? I told you so!s to their pet journalists or staff members of the congressional oversight committees, the so-called watchdogs of the CIA.

Anyway, the report on the three East Germans I was working on became a high-priority document. We had to explain why we had whisked away three communist high-ups, saving them from the anger and likely retribution of their fellow countrymen. Who were these three, and why were they chosen to get a new life in the United States? I remember thinking it was a no-brainer. The three had risked everything—lives, status, the safety of their families —for us. We owed them. Lisa had been one of the fifteen or twenty people I’d interviewed in the course of writing the report. Her account became my epilogue to show how well these CIA-certified good guys were settling in in the land of the free.

The details—what I needed to know—were lost somewhere in time-space, along with so many other items: how to do the regression analysis required for econometrics; who was the third boy I slept with. I’d always had a B-minus memory, unlike Adam, who could come up with a tome of trivia on any ant who happened to cross our picnic table, or Maddy, who could quote the entire oeuvre of every neurasthenic female poet who lived in the Cotswolds before 1940, and they were legion. My notes jogged what memories I retained, but they didn’t help me come up with the big picture.

Now, fifteen years later, I knew objectively that Lisa could have sought my help in communicating with the press on any of a million matters, not just that report. Maybe she wanted to tell all or tell some about Islamic terrorists in Boca Raton or, for all I knew, extraterrestrials taking over the government of Honduras. But during her years at the Agency, she no doubt dealt with other report writers besides me. She’d had access to everything from radical Islam to experts on the demographics of Central America.

Okay, she had claimed she needed me to get to CNN because I worked in television. But half the employees of the Agency knew which journalists could be trusted to make good use of news leaks. And if Lisa was part of the other half? Washington was filled with reporters aching for a good spook story. She could cold-call almost anyone. Therefore, I decided Lisa had come to me because I had some particular knowledge that could help her, not because of my media contacts.

And what I knew, Ben Mattingly would know because he’d been my supervisor. So while I was rehearsing the phone call I’d thought, Let me see if he thinks Lisa was calling me over something to do with those three Germans. I’ll mention Manfred Gottesman-turned-Dick Schroeder. Maybe Ben will remember something about the case that would have made it resonate with Lisa all these years later. But then I hadn’t asked him. I was afraid he’d think there was something fishy in my remembering so much. Why could I recall in such detail a mention of some German in a report I wrote fifteen years earlier? Ben could probably recall enough about me and my work to know that my memory was no better or worse than anybody else’s. He’d have to conclude that I had a copy of the report, or at least that I had taken notes.

So I decided to keep the Germans to myself. I would go to Ohio and pay Dick Schroeder a visit.

I TOLD ADAM THE TRUTH, that I was going to Cincinnati for a day or two to talk with a former East German communist who’d been brought over at the end of the Cold War. He accepted the trip as part of my job writing Spy Guys. Had he told me a comparable lie, that he had to go to Cincinnati to consult on wild boar entrails, I would have accepted it as part of his job as chief pathologist at the Bronx Zoo.

The question was, how would I find Schroeder? In my scripts neither HH nor Jamie ever acted directly. Finding an address, for instance: looking something up in a phone book wasn’t visual enough, plus I had twenty-two minutes to fill between the first and the final commercial breaks. Finding where someone lived meant tracking down mysterious Mr. X’s former personal trainer, who had a grudge against him and was glad to give out Mr. X’s unlisted phone number and address.

This was real life, however. While I was considering whether it was worth spending the money at some shady Web site to maybe get the hush-hush whereabouts of Richard Schroeder in Cincinnati, I did a quick switchboard.com search. Bingo! It got me three Richard Schroeders. For free. The first of these, with that variety of Midwestern accent a New Yorker would mimic by holding her nose, told me that the Queen City Sweets Richard—“He’s in the business section of the Enquirer practically every month”—lived in an area called Indian Hill. “That section is the cream of the cream of the cream,” he said. “If you get my meaning.”

I certainly got his meaning the following day, Saturday, when the prissy voice of the global positioning system in the Jaguar I’d rented at the Cincinnati airport (hoping to blend into the cream with a sufficiently creamy car) announced, “You have arrived,” as I pulled up in front of the iron gate that closed off the driveway to the Schroeders’ gold stone Tudor mansion.

Old Manfred-turned-Dick had definitely arrived. The high noon sun beamed down on the colored slate tiles of the roof, making them look like rectangular gemstones. The central part of the house was a gold cube with wings extending on either side. Each of these wings had spawned wings of its own that sprouted dormers, bay windows, stuccoed areas striped with split timbers. The roof had brought forth several gables, a noble stone chimney, and three high-reaching cylindrical clay chimneys perched close together. All in all, this was a proper American dream house that had grown to keep pace with its owner’s wealth.

About twenty feet behind the gate, a tall white flagpole flew Old Glory, or at least held it up high. There was no wind. The humidity seemed to have seeped into the flag’s fabric, so it hung like a wet washcloth. But there was that matter of the gate. Closed. However, one of those boxy speakers sat atop a metal post, the un-high-tech kind of speaker boxes you see in noir movies in which all the men wear hats. Okay, I’d come on a Saturday on the chance of catching Manfred-Dick at home, but I hadn’t pictured such an intimidating residence — I guess you’d have to call it an estate — complete with a locked gate. I’d seen myself ringing the doorbell of an upscale suburban colonial with a Mercedes in the driveway. It would be answered by Dick Schroeder, who, when I smiled at him, would think, Hmmm, lusty, bosomy Jewess, and because he’d had an Oedipus complex, it would work to my advantage. Or if it was Mrs. Dick, my mere smile would establish an immediate sense of sisterly simpatico and she’d let me in and whisper to her husband, Mein darling, you absolutely must talk mit her. Naturally, I’d also imagined every horror. Dick siccing meat-starved Dobermans on me. An appointed-for-life CIA security detail shooting me down in cold blood. But since I could have filled the Library of Congress with all the self-help books I had bought over the years, I was determined to substitute all anxiety images with visualizations of me being successful.

I opened the car window to reach out and press the button on the speaker. I don’t know what I was waiting for—maybe a butler’s voice intoning, What is it you wish, madam? Instead, the gates opened slowly enough to give me time to get afraid. I drove around the circular driveway to the front door praying that the wave of nausea that suddenly contracted my esophagus and was rising to my throat wouldn’t get any worse. I didn’t want to choose between heaving over the tan leather passenger seat of the rented Jag or onto the stone entranceway of Schroeder Manor.

I rang the bell, which chimed a low-pitched, understated Bong! Bong! rather than the first fourteen notes of some Bach ditty. I heard high heels hurrying across a hard floor. The door opened.

“Oh,” a woman said, pulling back her head in surprise. She looked around my age. Girl Child Schroeder grown up, I figured, since she was wearing a pale turquoise silk skirt with a matching sleeveless blouse that didn’t look like any maid’s uniform. Considering it was already an expensive outfit, what probably was a Pucci sweater was tossed over her shoulders. The sleeves hung untied down the front and looked awkward, as if they were trying to cop a feel. She was softly pretty, blond-haired and blue-eyed, like an older sister of Charlize Theron —but a sister who ought to start considering hormone replacement therapy as she was looking a little thin-skinned and a lot jittery. Anyway, Girl Child was gnawing one of her nails. The edges of a few of them were serrated where the polish had been chewed off.