Past Perfect (21 page)

“Fair enough. And you can call me Jacques.”

“So where did you get the name?”

“It was my father’s.” My buddy Jacques was not overly generous in the information department. “Are you called Katherine?”

“Katie. Kate if you’re the monosyllabic type. I want to clear something up, though. It’s not as if I spent the last fifteen years rubbing my hands together and plotting how to get justice from the Agency.” I made a big deal about swallowing because I wasn’t sure of the wisdom of telling all, or even telling some, to Jacques. On the other hand, there was no other hand. He was my last and therefore best hope. “A few weeks ago,” I began, “I got a call from someone I had known at the Agency. Lisa Golding.”

I looked at him long enough until he said, “Never heard of her.” He stood and walked around and leaned on the back of the chair, which seemed, somehow, to know not to rock. “I’m assuming that’s not the end of the story. Somehow this led you to want to speak to someone familiar with the situation in East Germany in eighty-nine.”

“Yes.” I considered getting up too, but the back of my chair was low enough that if I rested my arms on it, I’d look like Quasimodo. So sitting there, I told him how Lisa had offered to tell me why I was fired in exchange for my help, and then gave him a three-word character sketch —amusing, talented, untruthful —and a description of her job. Since I wasn’t about to tell him of my notes down in the basement, in the crypt, I said, “I spent days trying to remember what I’d worked on with her. The only thing I could come up with that might still have meaning was …” I stopped for a moment, then said, “I’d feel better if you swore to me you weren’t recording this.”

“Swear to you? It’s a damn good thing you didn’t apply to clandestine services. You take somebody at their word?”

“Didn’t you ever decide to trust someone?” I asked him.

“Yes. Yes, I did. All right then, I swear to you I’m not recording this.” He smiled. “I’ll have to watch your show now, learn how spies behave.” I didn’t smile. “I assure you, no one is hidden in the attic and taking this conversation down in shorthand either.” To me, asking him about recording wasn’t such a way-out question, what with him living alone in a huge house in a forest on top of a mountain with two chipper but slightly threatening people working for him. He wasn’t exactly Mr. Normal.

“I feel more comfortable,” I said, “and what good would it do me to be uncomfortable?” The names of the three Germans weren’t in my notes. Considering my B-minus memory, it was a miracle I’d come up with the name Manfred Gottesman. The other two were blanks, and I needed someone—hopefully Jacques —to fill them in. “Now I can tell you about stuff that’s probably still classified. Not even probably.” Casually, I wondered what the penalty was these days for disclosing top-secret information. “In late November of eighty-nine, December also, I guess, we took in three East Germans who’d helped us, who’d worked for the government. I could only remember one of their names.” I was frightened, as if my next sentence would bring some terrible retribution that would not, as in the show, be followed by a commercial break. “One of them was a Stasi official named Manfred Gottesman.”

“Jesus!” Jacques said.

“You’ve heard of him?”

“The Agency brought Manfred Gottesman to the States?”

“Yes.”

“I’d heard it, but I really didn’t believe it,” Jacques said. “As far as I knew, whatever he did for us didn’t merit a new life here.”

“From what I heard, it did.”

Had life been a 1940s British spy novel, the character would have harrumphed and looked down his nose. Jacques just said, “What did you hear?”

“That he’d been number three in the Stasi and had been passing along names of who might be spying against us —or against West Germany. Also that he filled us in on meetings between the head of Stasi and Honecker. So he helped us big-time. Anyway, for a dyed-in-the-wool communist, he turned out to be quite a capitalist once he got here.”

“Do you know if he’s still living here?” Jacques asked.

“Not anymore. He died about a week ago.” I waited for him to say Oh or maybe Too bad or Good riddance to bad rubbish! but since he didn’t, I added, “He died of a rare infection. Do you think that’s significant?”

“Significant of what? People get rare infections. If you mean do I think someone emptied a syringe full of some exotic virus — ”

“Fungus.”

“ — fungus into his vitamin pills, I’d say, ‘I don’t know.”’

“But you wouldn’t rule it out?”

“Rule out that Manfred Gottesman died an unnatural death? No, of course not. He’s the type of man I could happily have killed myself.”

BY THE TIME I got around to telling Jacques Harlow about how I tracked down Manfred Gottesman-Dick Schroeder by recalling the name Queen City Sweets, I wanted to call it a day. My stomach still wasn’t a hundred percent. The emotional pogo stick of Jacques-good guy, Jacques-psycho had wiped me out and I found myself doing the close mouth/flare nostrils routine to hide my yawn. What I needed was a nap.

I didn’t get it. Also, I didn’t know what to do about Jacques’s next words: “Let’s go upstairs.” Okay, maybe I had picked up a scintilla or two of sexual interest on his part, but I’d put it down to what could be expected from a recluse in the presence of a still-fecund female wearing lipstick. He walked across the expanse of room, not bothering to look back to see if I was following him; his stride was more than an amble, less than a march. “The more I think about Gottesman dying from an obscure disease …” He shrugged and his sentence faded into the mountain air.

Now he was only a few feet from the wide wood staircase that led up to a gallery —a kind of long hallway—that overlooked the downstairs. Since his musing about Gottesman’s death didn’t sound like a come-on, I figured I was safe. I rose from the Papa Bear chair and hurried to catch up with him. If he suddenly started making humping motions with his hips, I’d think of something.

“Poison, maybe,” I heard him saying, “and even that’s highly unlikely. Not by the Agency. Not in the U.S. I never watched your show, but murder by microbe sounds like something you’d see on television. From everything I know, the times that ops sidle up to somebody these days and stick them with something sharp that’s covered with botulism or some kind of hemorrhagic fever virus? Zero. Just to be on the safe side, close to zero.”

“So you don’t think Dick Schroeder—Gottesman —was murdered?”

“I didn’t say that.”

I was on the stairs now, three steps behind him. “Okay, so what are you saying?”

“Right now,” Jacques replied, his voice forty degrees chillier than room temperature, “not much of anything.”

At the top of the stairs, he turned left and passed the first door. I followed. Downstairs there had been no decoration on the walls: no paintings, Indian blankets, deer heads. But along the hallway, there were a series of wood-framed photographs of sunsets, taken in different places. It was hard to tell where, because even the city sunsets lacked any identifiable skyline, just an occasional, undistinguished building of brick or stone. The typical “Nature at Sundown” ones differed from each other only in the intensity of their coloration and bits of landscape —palms or pines, desert or snowcapped mountain. I wondered if these untraceable mementos were Jacques’s record of his life in the service of his country. Pictures without people, scenes without scenery.

The next door down was closed, but he opened the third. God knows what I was expecting. Okay, probably a heart-shaped bed covered in pink quilted satin. Inside was a long table with metal legs, the kind caterers cover with a cloth and serve hors d’oeuvres on. It was bare except for a few pieces of electronic equipment under the table. Two identical large, flat-screen computer monitors as well as a mouse and one of those curvy, ergonomic keyboards were on top. The only other furniture was a secretary-style chair with wheels.

“Come in,” Jacques said as he took the chair.

“How come you have two monitors?”

“Sometimes I need them.” He pressed a button, and two towers and a cubish thing powered up. Tiny blue and green lights flashed busily. That was quickly followed by a full-volume “Ta-da!” and a blast of music that sounded Wagnerian, enhanced—if it can be called that—by an aggressive subwoofer. After all that fuss, one screen lit up and displayed only the conventional Windows XP logo; the other remained dark. I hadn’t advanced from the doorway, and he stood, swiveled the chair a little, and said, “Here. Sit.” Just as I was about to make the big Oh, it’s all right, I’ll stand declaration, he left the room. He returned carrying a bentwood chair that he placed directly in front of the keyboard.

Seconds later, I was seeing a document in German on the monitor. I couldn’t exactly read it, but I was able to make out enough to get part of a sentence: “… für den Staat DDR gehandelt hätten und somit Immunität genössen. Nachdem im February 1990,” which I thought meant something like if East Germany had acted, then immunity would have … something-or-other … and then, after, in February of ’90 … By the time I translated the little I could, Jacques was two or three Web pages ahead of me.

I couldn’t be sure, but if he had deviously planned to put the chair he’d offered me far enough from the monitor so I would have trouble reading (but not necessarily think he was trying to keep me from seeing what he was doing) then he succeeded. Except the chair had wheels, so I came in closer.

Reasonably clever of me, until he said, “Back up. I don’t like people reading over my shoulder.” So I wheeled back, squinted, saw almost nothing other than him double-clicking a lot. Periodically I glanced at my watch, not just to check the time, but in the vain hope that I would discover a second hand so I could follow it around and have something to do. After twenty minutes, Jacques got up and said, “We can go back downstairs now.”

Once we were in the hallway, I asked, “How come you asked me to come up here with you if you didn’t want me reading over your shoulder?”

“I thought you’d be more comfortable.”

“More comfortable up here than downstairs?”

“I didn’t want to disappear and have you think I was busy preparing a syringe full of smallpox virus.”

“Thank you,” I said as we started to descend.

“You’re welcome.” He was one of those people who didn’t put his hand on the banister going down.

“Actually, I would have thought of something more prosaic, like you were up there loading a semiautomatic pistol.”

From the back, I saw him shake his head at my faux pas. “You wouldn’t fire a semiautomatic weapon indoors,” he said.

“A regular gun would do it?”

“Correct.”

When we reached the bottom of the stairs, I asked, “Was I emitting waves of fear? I didn’t think I was.”

“No. I sensed you felt out of your element.”

“Well, more like out of my league. Playing with the big spy boys and only knowing some of the rules.”

We got back into the living room area and resumed what seemed to be our assigned seats. “This is what I got off the Internet just now,” Jacques said. “From sites accessible to the public … and one not. Gottesman was charged with a number of crimes, including ordering the bombing of a discotheque in West Berlin in which two U.S. soldiers were killed. There were a few specific human rights abuses, including kidnapping and murder. Also multiple manslaughter charges because he signed a shoot-to-kill order for East German citizens trying to escape to the West.”

“Do you think there was actual evidence?” I asked. “There was wholesale burning and shredding of Stasi documents in November of eighty-nine.”

“That’s true, but if Gottesman hadn’t escaped, there would have been enough officers and noncommissioned Stasi personnel to testify against him. They could make at least some of the charges stick without a lot of documentary evidence.” He closed his eyes and started rocking back and forth.

I waited. For all I knew he was taking a quick nap so I announced, “I don’t get it.”

Without opening his eyes, Jacques asked, “Don’t get what?”

“Why we would take someone who had committed crimes or abuses on that scale and give him our protection? Allow him to enjoy our freedom?” His pale, spooky eyes opened and he looked straight at me. “Are you going to say, ‘Don’t be so naive’?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “I’m not. Maybe he had something to offer that was so valuable he was able to strike that bargain with us. From my point of view, Defense, there wasn’t any priceless information someone like Gottesman, in the secret police, would have—unless he fell upon something. Or he could have been in a blackmail situation with someone in his own or the Soviet military. Except that didn’t happen.”

“So what you’re saying is that he didn’t have anything for you that would make you or the Secretary of Defense or whoever promise him the moon.”

“Cincinnati,” he said.

“Right. I stand corrected. Sit corrected. Anyway, your implication seems to be that he might have had other information that was priceless to some other intelligence agency.”

“Yes.”

“If that’s the case, if we had all this fabulous information, then why did we mess up so badly in our intelligence estimates?”

He stopped midrock. “What do you mean?”

“We brought this man and the two other Germans over at the same time. They were treated as a package deal, although I don’t think they worked together. As much as I can remember, which isn’t much at all, Gottesman was the only one who had been with the Stasi. I don’t even know if any of the three knew each other. But it was the perfect moment for people to get out. The only moment, really. The East German government had imploded and it was before whatever evidence that hadn’t been destroyed could be examined. So we brought out these three movers and shakers. Former movers and shakers. What I’m saying is, if we’d have been found out, we would have seriously pissed off West Germany.”

A shadow of displeasure crossed his face and I assumed it was because he wasn’t a fan of women saying pissed off. Naturally, that made me want to shout all George Carlin’s dirty seven. Instead I gave him a torrent of clean language: “We risked inflaming world opinion, for God’s sake. The Wall coming down was a glorious moment. All around the world, people were thinking, How great! And now all those officials responsible for the repression are going to get what’s coming to them. Except, because of us, these three didn’t. Also, bringing them here cost us a fortune. This isn’t like the FBI’s witness protection program, where you’re plopping down some low-level gang member in Albuquerque — and even that’s not a discount deal. Look, we obviously set Gottesman-Schroeder up in business. What did that alone cost? A hundred thousand dollars? Half a mil? All that risk, all that money. For what? So the oversight committees could report we did a lousy job foreseeing what would happen?”