Past Perfect (22 page)

Jacques crossed his arms over his chest. “We’ve made bad bargains before,” he said slowly. “Stupid deals. From funding the 2506 Brigade to invading Cuba to acting on the theory that WMD in Iraq was a slam dunk.”

“I know,” I conceded. “Sometimes we show a real gift for stupid deals. But that doesn’t answer my question.”

“What do you mean?” Jacques asked.

“The Cuban invasion, Iraq … they were ongoing operations. No one could predict with absolute certainty what would happen. The three East Germans were different. Their country was toast. We weren’t in the middle of any operation that required their input. At best they could report to us that so-and-so wasn’t just a cog in the wheel, that he was the wheel itself—and we could pass that information on to Bonn. But we put so much effort into bringing those three here. I remember my boss going to Berlin two or three times in November and December. Hush-hush visits. The only reason I heard about them was because I was working on time-sensitive reports he wanted to review personally. I guess he told his secretary it was okay to let me know when he’d gone and when he’d be back.”

“Why was he going?”

“He’d been one of the guys who had guessed wrong, so maybe he had a little mopping up to do there to make himself look better. God, I wish I could remember more. But normally he only went to Eastern Europe once every couple of months. So at least part of what he was doing at the end of eighty-nine was grabbing these three and pulling them out before the authorities—or some of their fellow citizens—could grab them.”

“So you think it was your boss’s doing?” Jacques asked.

“I’m starting to realize that’s the only logical conclusion. But putting him aside. What was Lisa Golding’s role in all this … Could she have been perceived as a threat because of what she knew about the three? If she’d outed Dick Schroeder—or the other two—what would have happened to them?”

“If she’d exposed them now? Well, if she made an announcement that Mr. Schroeder was really Manfred Gottesman, who had been number two or three in the Stasi, there might have been a few raised eyebrows in Cincinnati, and even some legitimate moral outrage. The statute of limitations on serious crimes committed by DDR officials expired in 2002. There’s no time bar on murder, but unless they had a strong case, they couldn’t have extradited an American citizen. And it’s a basic principle of German criminal law that a defendant’s presence is required at trial.”

“So if the Agency wanted to stop Lisa from talking, it would only have been the social and business consequences they were worried about?”

“Seems that way.” He rubbed his chin. He hadn’t shaved that day because his beard made a scratchy sound. His hair was almost totally gray with just a touch of brown, but his beard must have been close to the ruddy color of his skin; I could see no trace of it. “Diplomatic consequences too. And keep in mind that if your Lisa had made such a public disclosure, she, herself, would have been liable for prosecution here. Everyone at the Agency signs an oath. You know that.”

I felt myself flushing because I was certainly violating my oath. The proof that I’d disclosed classified information was that Jacques had long discounted rumors of Gottesman being brought to the United States and had been surprised when I’d told him about it. I could be prosecuted under some felonious verbalization statute.

On the other hand, why was he talking to me? Okay, he hadn’t given away any secrets. But it was weird that such a solitary man would say yes to an interview and actually insist I do it in person. Jacques Harlow was not your celebrity-struck average Joe. Working in TV, I found I could call up almost anybody with a question, say I was a writer for the TV show Spy Guys, and he’d be glad to speak to me. Celebrity culture. Not that I was a celebrity. Dani and Javiero were, however. If people couldn’t get the real thing, they’d settle for writer-in-glam-industry-who-deals-personally-with-celebrity. (If I were a poet, most of these same people would probably have told me to drop dead.) But Jacques struck me as Mr. C-SPAN. He also seemed as immune to celebrity worship as a person could get, probably because his interests lay elsewhere. He was a reader of Air & Space Power Journal, not Entertainment Weekly. So unless Huff Van Damme had said something wonderful about me, which I doubted, how come Jacques had said yes?

As the sun rose higher over the mountain, the light streaming in through the windows began to heat the house. If wood walls could perspire, they were doing it; the place smelled like a lumberyard. I was wearing what I’d thought were sensible black cotton slacks and a yellow cotton shirt, sleeves rolled back, but they were both starting to stick to my skin like Post-it notes. I felt a trickle of sweat meandering down my Achilles tendon.

“Getting too warm in here?” Jacques asked at that moment.

While I didn’t like being so easy to read, I was grateful either to his intuition or his realization his own deodorant was on the verge of meltdown. “Yes.”

It was only when he said, “It’s cooler outside” that I realized the house probably wasn’t air-conditioned. What kind of guy would build such a sprawling, expensive house in a Southern state and not put in air-conditioning? “Let’s go.” He led me through the kitchen and, without asking, handed me a Coke from a high-end refrigerator my father would have approved of. I decided not to ask if he had diet. He poured himself another mug of coffee and held the door as we went outside.

The house, I now saw, had been built to take every advantage of the mountain. Just outside the kitchen was a small, flat area, no larger than a good-size Manhattan living room. Beyond this little plateau, the mountainside dropped down at least a thousand feet. Naturally, there was no fence around it, as Jacques obviously appreciated open vistas and presumably expected his guests to have enough sense not to hover on the edge in stiletto heels. He didn’t seem to have factored in visitors with acrophobia. It really was a glorious sight. A thin, humid mist rose from the trees way down the mountain, softening the view and giving the panorama a green haze —like in some lesser Impressionist painting. I decided to enjoy it from the security of a picnic table and parked myself on the bench that was a safe ten feet from the drop.

“Beautiful,” I said.

“It is.” He sat on the bench with me, a proper couple of feet away. If he was so intuitive, I wondered if he knew I was speculating on where he’d gotten the money for such an impressive house. The no-air-conditioning business seemed more a conscious choice than a cost-cutting measure, though I couldn’t say why I decided that. But I sensed family money more than canny investments or luck at roulette.

“What made you settle here?” I asked.

“I liked it.” I was beginning to sec why he lived alone. However, I couldn’t judge whether his withholding information was affected-Jacques Harlow, Mystery Man Without a Past —or something he felt necessary for his own safety or peace of mind. “Who was your boss at the Agency?” he asked. “The one who kept going to Berlin.”

“Benton Mattingly.”

“Oh.” His response took just a second too long. “Are you still in touch with him?”

“Not really.” I cleared my throat. “‘Not really’ means that naturally, once I got fired, I was cut off from all contact with anyone I’d worked with, including Ben. But I did make that call to him about Lisa Golding a week or so ago. Actually, I was a little surprised he was willing to speak to me. I mean, besides the fact that in the Agency’s view I’m forever tainted. Did you know he’s head of a big telecommunications company now, and his name is being tossed around as the next secretary of commerce?”

“Did he know anything about Lisa?” Jacques was looking off into the distance, at another mountain not as high as his.

“No. He said he would ask some non-Agency contacts, but he wasn’t holding out too much hope. I don’t know whether he was just saying that or if he meant it.”

“It’s safe to assume he was just saying it.”

“I guess you’ve met Ben,” I said.

“Yes.”

“And you don’t like him.”

“Not much.” He turned toward me. “Not at all.”

“How come? I assume this isn’t the sort of conversation that interests you, but I’m curious.”

“You were one of his girls?” he asked casually, as if not caring whether I answered.

“You mean did I have an affair with him? Yes. Just for three months: he dropped me faster than most. But it was more than a year after that before I was fired. We worked together comfortably enough after the romance ended. And a few months after it was over, I met my husband.”

“The man you’re married to now?” My arms were resting on the table and he was looking at my wedding ring. Plain gold, now unfashionably wide. When we’d picked out our rings, I’d pointed to it and said to Adam, “That’s the one. I’ll always feel married in it.” At the time, maybe I’d been counting on its width as juju against thinking about Ben.

“Yes. Same guy. He’s a veterinary pathologist at the Bronx Zoo. Not into espionage.” Without stopping, I asked, “Why don’t you like Ben?”

Even in profile, I caught his blink, blink of discomposure. Finally he said, “He put as much energy into maintaining his social position as he did into his work.” His voice was slightly hoarse, as if the sentence was being pulled out of him against his will, which I guess it was.

“That’s it?”

“You didn’t come here to discuss Mr. Mattingly.”

I hadn’t. But I recalled that Ben’s prominence in the mix of new money, journalists, think-tank people, and politicos — the alternative to old-line Washington society —had always been a sore point at the Agency and, obviously, from Jacques’s attitude, in the larger intelligence community. Certainly Ben had the intellect to deserve the job he had. Yet the charm that had made him a dinner party darling and expert seducer had alienated many of the analysts in the Agency. At the time, I’d put most of it down to jealousy of the dull for anyone who sparkled. That could have been true with Jacques as well; men naturally resented one of their own who was able to do what they could not —or would not: marry for money, drive Maseratis, make people laugh, be listened to by powerful people. “What else do you want to know?” Jacques asked. “Substance. I don’t have time to talk about personalities.”

I sipped my Coke and realized I hadn’t had a nondiet soda since sixth grade. It gave me a heady rush, both from its chemistry and also from the pleasure of imbibing an illicit substance, like the first few times I’d smoked pot. “I need to talk about personalities. Well, about people. The other two.”

“The other two?” he asked, though he clearly knew whom I meant.

“The other two Germans who came out with Manfred Gottesman.”

“Why?”

“Because one of them might lead me to Lisa. Or at least know something about her.”

“That’s a ridiculous long shot.”

“I don’t have a short shot.”

“This Lisa is a liar. I cannot understand why you would believe her in the first place, that she knows the truth about why you were fired. She could make up anything.” Before I could speak … actually, before I could even come up with a response, he continued: “If she did have some valuable or dangerous information she wanted to get out to the public, why, of all people, would she choose you to facilitate it? Don’t misunderstand me. I didn’t mean that at all as an insult. I meant, wouldn’t it be more likely for her to go to a journalist, someone who’s familiar with the intelligence community?”

“Look,” I said, “you’re right to be asking those questions. I thought she was nuts when she called. I tried to get her off the phone, until she brought up my being fired. I admit that now I’m curious about what she wanted to disclose to a journalist, assuming it wasn’t some asinine story she made up. Or if she was telling a lie, why? And why to me? But bottom line is, I want to get in touch with her because I want the chance to learn what happened to me.”

It was getting toward noon, and both the temperature and humidity were climbing. Jacques’s face had a sheen of sweat. I touched my forehead. It felt wetter than a mere sheen. Unlike inside the house, the heat here didn’t feel oppressive. I didn’t need my usual anti-hotness techniques of imagining myself skiing on an Alp in an unzipped Polartec vest, or, conversely, being a dauntless Israelite wandering around the desert for forty years and never kvetching about the heat. I put my elbows on the table and my chin in my hands.

Jacques, on the other hand, continued to sit straight, as if the bench had a perfectly comfortable back to rest against. “This entire business is most likely nothing. But you never know, do you? I find it strange she called you after —what? —fifteen years. There could have been a purpose to the call, though when you’re dealing with someone like her—”

“I know she’s a little off. Maybe a lot off. But there are more off types in the intelligence community than in other places.”

“No, there are not,” Jacques said.

“What?”

“Do you honestly believe there are more ‘off types’ at the CIA than in your television business?”

When I thought about it, I had to smile. “Actually, there are more crazies in TV. But I wasn’t in clandestine services. I was working with a lot of ex-academics and specialists in all sorts of areas.”

“As far as I could see, Defense Intelligence reflected the general population in terms of what you call crazies vis-à-vis stable people. Your Lisa doesn’t sound as if she were among the stable. She would have lied if she’d been a nun.”

“You could be right.”

“Could be and am,” he said.

“One thing: If Lisa had anything big to say, and if she were dealing with people like her, with her strange moral code, could she be dead? Could somebody at the Agency have gone wink-wink, ‘Check out Lisa Golding, who’s going to blab and expose us,’ and the next day she’s history?”

“Because she had a story that was potentially embarrassing?” Jacques asked. “Even humiliating? If that were true, half the administration and two-thirds of the Pentagon would be belly-up. No, I don’t see it.” He didn’t go Ahem or move, but he allowed a couple of seconds to go by before he continued: “Now, as to your two other East Germans.”