Past Perfect (15 page)

When she returned, though, her expression was not serene. She was clutching a fistful of tissues. “Dick is in a coma.”

I’D BEEN GOOGLING Dick Schroeder since my return from Cincinnati, keeping my fingers crossed he’d pull through. Three days later, I was staring at the computer monitor, astounded. Dead! It happened so fast. I’d been too optimistic, expecting several weeks of nothing new, of being steered by search engines to the same articles about Queen City Sweets and the Richard and Meredith Schroeder Music Building at the University of Cincinnati.

I learned more from Dick’s obituary than I had from his wife. He had come to the United States from Leipzig in 1989, after managing the state-run confectionery industry. Not a bad story. The obit talked about how he’d found himself in constant opposition to the authorities there. He was quoted as saying, “There is nothing worse than cheap chocolate,” which, had I been an ex-German Jew, was an opinion I might have withheld.

The man in the obituary sounded like the nicest sort of tycoon— philanthropic, appreciative of his good fortune. He was a sports lover; besides being a great fan of the Cincinnati Reds and the Bengals he was a golfer, boater, fisherman, and hunter. The piece quoted a chamber of commerce speech he’d made about how grateful he was to the United States. “This country gave me a life I thought was possible only in Hollywood movies.”

The obituary said he was survived by his wife Meredith Spalding Schroeder. No mention of children or previous marriages. “Mr. Schroeder died from complications of a rare fungus infection, blastomycosis. The fungus, on very few occasions, has been associated with recreational activities around the Ohio River and its streams. This phenomenon occurs at times when the water gets a high level of moist soil rich in organic debris or rotting wood.”

Even though I’d never met him, I felt sad, though admittedly not ferklempt. I had to give him credit: surviving all those years of hardship as a child, then having the brains and guile to thrive in East Germany. Then coming to America, making it big as a candy tycoon and having what looked like a loving marriage. But that’s life: out of the blue, some weird-ass fungus comes along when you’re fishing for whatever people fish for in Cincinnati, and it’s Auf Wiedersehen forever.

That night —it must have been around two or three —I woke up. Adam and I, as occasionally happened, were sharing the same pillow. Mine. When I complained about it one time, he’d done his Willie Nelson impression, singing “Don’t Fence Me In.” Then he told me Wyoming guys needed more territory than New Yorkers. Anyway, we were lying on our left sides, spoon position, and his arm was around me, his hand warmly tucked in my cleavage, his breath stirring my hair.

Before I was conscious of having the thought, I must have stiffened because Adam turned over and, in his sleep, felt for his own pillow. What if Dick Schroeder hadn’t, say, stuck his hand into some stream to grab a fish? What if instead the blastomycosis had been induced? Cut it out, I ordered myself. Those kinds of ideas come straight out of espionage novels and spy movies, of which I had read an unhealthy number. They were not about reality, not about the CIA as I knew it. All that stuff about “wet work,” “sanctioning,” “executive action” doesn’t happen to a mini-mogul in Cincinnati, even if he happens to be an ex-Stasi guy.

Okay, it had been known to happen elsewhere to, say, heads of state and insurrectionists who had seriously pissed us off. The most infamous case, the Agency’s attempt to kill Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar, was alternately hilarious, inventive, and frightening in its wicked childishness. There had also been talk of an assassination attempt on a Hezbollah leader. Of sponsoring Salvador death squads to hit rebel leaders. None of that had anything to do with my time at the Agency, God knows.

If I’d had to put money on Assassinations, Yes or No, I would have said yes. Of course. There had been and still were political assassinations and attempted assassinations—though the old KGB was reputed to be not just a more frequent employer of such methods, but a hell of a lot more efficient. But outside of novels and movies, there was almost no chance the Agency would be going after U.S. citizens inside the United States. Could there be a rogue agent? Yes. A cabal of them? Unlikely but possible. Would they be out to get a guy who last wielded power in East Germany in 1989?

I had to laugh at myself, which I might have done if Adam hadn’t been sound asleep. Well, I probably wouldn’t have, because while I might be amusing enough to get Entertainment Weekly to call Spy Guys “occasionally witty,” and self-deprecating enough to amuse guests at the usual Manhattan gatherings of the semiclever, laughing at myself, when by myself, had never been my forte.

I pushed my pillows into a mound of the proper height, but sleep wasn’t happening. I alternated between uneasy and unglued. I remembered how Dix had told me I had to be more analytical. Okay. Was Lisa truly about to reveal some matter of national importance, as she had claimed? Assuming she was, could the late Manfred-Dick have been somehow involved? And if so, what would the CIA have to do with it? Would they go into a SCIF, a room within a room where top-secret information can be discussed, and say, Let’s think of a rare disease someone living in Cincinnati could convincingly contract, something that would be hard enough to diagnose that the guy we’re killing would be dead before the final lab test results came back?

Anyhow, what did this have to do with me? Dick Schroeder was dead and therefore could not lead me to Lisa. The real question was, how come her call had set me off the way it had? And why couldn’t I leave this whole business alone? Had I gone from my normal anxiety-ridden state to being overtly whacko? When Americans went nuts, I mused, probably half the time they thought the CIA was after them —or after someone important to them. If not the CIA itself, they’d think Mossad or the KGB was listening to phone conversations, or putting hypnotic drugs into their Starbucks, or sneaking transmitters into silicone breast implants. Just before I fell asleep, I sensed I was getting too close to the deep end. Time to stop thinking about some operative sprinkling deadly fungus over Dick Schroeder’s muesli.

The last time I recalled seeing Dr. Jo-Ellen McCracken Hazan was when I was about fifteen, a day or two after I had misread some package directions and dyed my hair orange instead of the Debbie Harry blond I was aiming for. Naturally, I then insisted that garish orange was the color I had wanted all along. When my mother and I ran into Dr. Hazan in the shoe department at Saks, the two of them had squealed and hugged each other and launched into an extended Oh my God, it’s been ages routine. In their case it was true because after being medical school classmates, Dr. Hazan had gone on to do a residency in infectious diseases and settled in L.A. The reason I remembered her, and fondly, was because she didn’t recoil or blink at the sight of me.

I called her at noon, nine California time, and, amazingly, got through two secretaries without having to give my curriculum vitae. After a moment of chatting, during which I told her I no longer had orange hair and she assured me that what she remembered was that Carol Schottland had a delightful daughter, I asked her if she knew about blastomycosis. I was the writer for an espionage-adventure show on TV and, while I conceded it sounded brutal, I wanted to kill off a character this way.

“Well, if blastomycosis —it’s sometimes called Gilchrist’s disease—is not diagnosed and treated, it can be fatal,” Dr. Hazan said. “It’s considered a rare disease, you know.”

“I heard about a man in Cincinnati who got it. He did a lot of fishing in and around the Ohio River, I guess.”

“Well, that would be the place for it. It’s found in the Midwest and the Southeast too. Farmers get it, and so do hunters, campers. And fishermen also, it appears. How is he doing?”

“He died.” She made a doctor noise that I translated as Too bad. “They called it a fever of unknown origin. It seemed as if he had the flu.”

“It usually presents with flulike symptoms,” she said. “Fever, chills, night sweats, cough, muscle aches, chest pains. The usual miseries. But blastomycosis can turn into a widespread infection that affects the skin and bones, the genitourinary tract. Sometimes even the meninges.” She must have read my silence as Duh because she added, “That’s one of the membranes that covers the brain and spinal cord.”

“How do people get it?”

“By inhalation. Breathing in airborne spores that come from contaminated soil.”

“Could someone get it by injection? I mean, if I had a character who was pierced with a sharp object loaded with blastomycosis fungi, could he get it?”

“I’ve heard of primary cutaneous blastomycosis that can follow a traumatic inoculation of the fungus into the skin. I’ve never seen a case. But you’re an entertainment show, right?”

“Right.”

“I think you’d be on pretty safe ground if you want to kill off somebody that way. Well, be sure to let me know if it’s going to be on TV. How exciting! Oh, and send my love to your mother.”

Since my father’s business was selling high-priced cookware, there was an elaborate test kitchen on the second floor of his headquarters. He loved to cook and could have been his own best customer, so while an architect had been designing Total Kitchen’s new location in a loft building in a down-and-almost-out neighborhood now called Tribeca, my father had told him he had another thought: Since there had to be plumbing for his fancy CEO bathroom, they might as well stick in a few more pipes so he could have a modest galley kitchen on the other side of his office.

Modesty was relative: the test kitchen had one of those six-burner restaurant stoves and a separate mini-dishwasher especially for glasses. Though his galley wasn’t large, my father was the kind of cook who demanded a mandolin to slice red onion for a sardine sandwich. Therefore, it was equipped beyond all reason, with three different types of citrus zesters and an espresso machine that could make a latté or a café cubano at the touch of one of its sleek oval buttons. From where I was sitting, I could look into the kitchen and admire the gleam of copper pots reflected in the glass and stainless steel doors of his refrigerator.

“See?” He gestured to a spinach salad with grilled chicken and mango and the Sauvignon Blanc he’d set out for lunch. “I got one advantage over your mother.” He was the same age as my mother, seventy. The black hairs that had once been on the backs of his hands had disappeared. The previous summer, when we’d been on the beach together, I noticed his legs looked waxed. I wondered if he would eventually turn into one of those old men who were baby-hairless, except for the odd strip of fur around the edges of their outer ears.

“What advantage?” I asked.

“I can have a table in front of my sofa. She can’t. Though I always said to her, Carol, would it be so terrible to give a patient a cup of coffee? Not the ones who lie down, because they’d dribble on the cushions. But almost all of them sit up. I’m not saying cookies or anything because that could interfere with the therapeutic alliance.”

“There’s one problem,” I said. “I don’t think she ever made a decent cup of coffee in her life. When I was about eight or nine you were in Europe somewhere on a buying trip. She made a pot of coffee for herself. When she tasted it, she spewed it out. I still remember the force of the spray, like from one of those things people have on their lawn. God, were we laughing!”

“I guess it wouldn’t be so terrific, her patients spritzing and worrying that her lousy coffee symbolized learned helplessness.” In their forty-six-year marriage, my father had picked up a lot of the lingo of my mother’s profession, talk she rarely used at home. But she delighted in the way be tossed her words around — magical thinking, rationalization — often with whim, occasionally with precision. The only time she corrected him was when he specifically asked, “Carol, babe, did I use that right?”

While he dished out the salad with a chichi stainless steel server that unfortunately reminded me of something on a tray of forceps in Adam’s necropsy lab, I tore off a chunk of bread from a baguette. The bread nestled in a cloth napkin in a wicker basket so heavily lacquered it looked carved out of rock. “Did Mom tell you I dropped by her office?” I asked.

He put my plate of salad in front of me. He had a talent. Not only would the salad be delicious, but it didn’t come out on my plate in one giant mishmash of ingredients, the way it would have if I’d served it. Somehow, despite tossing it in the bowl, my father had managed to get the greens on bottom and the chicken on top—with a fan of mango slices around it. “Yeah, she told me.” Then he gave me the encouraging smile which meant You can confide in me the way you do in your mother. My father was a sixties guy who had mortified me throughout my adolescence with his pleasure in telling my friends, “I was one of the first feminists!”

He didn’t fit the stereotype: someone scrawny and henpecked. Short and built like a shipping crate, my father could have been cast as one of Tony Soprano’s lesser henchmen. Though much better dressed. Also, since he’d started going bald in his early twenties, he always had what hair he possessed chopped short, marine-style. That would have looked odd on anyone else, especially during the late sixties when most men wore antimilitary monster sideburns and hair to rival Rapunzel’s. Yet my mother claimed that for some reason, he’d always been able to carry it off, year in and year out.

While he wasn’t elegant in the way she was, he had good taste and an ability to make anything look its best. He could put a bunch of wire whisks into an arrangement so pleasing you’d want to use it as a centerpiece. Likewise, he always looked just right for the occasion, from a black-tie wedding to a football game to the kiln room in a ceramics factory in Italy.

But a feminist was what he was. He and my mother met in their freshman year at Brooklyn College. Not being much of a student, he’d dropped out after his second year and got a dead-end job with a company that designed and installed window displays for mom-and-pop stores all over the city. He did canned peaches beneath a fake ficus plant pretending to be a tree; a beach pail full of antacids in the middle of a mound of sand; sneakers that danced up a step ladder.