Past Perfect (24 page)

“I knew Archie. I doubt if it was him. If he didn’t like you, he’d just make your life a hell. If you weren’t worth tormenting, he’d kick you out fast. So if you don’t think it was your boyfriend, and if it wasn’t Archie, does that mean you were number three in the department?”

“Of course not. All the analysts were on a much higher level than I was. It’s just that I dealt with them on an ad hoc basis, to get whatever information was necessary to put in a specific report. Then I had to go back to them and show them a first draft. Once they signed off on it, I wrote a second draft and sent that to Ben. He’d make his comments, and I’d rewrite, then submit it back to him. If it was okay, he’d show it to Archie. It almost never came back to me after that.”

Jacques waited after my sentences as well as his own. Finally he said, “Maybe Mattingly found it uncomfortable, you being there.”

“No, really, we worked very well together for over a year after the affair or whatever you call it. If anyone felt awkward, it was me. I mean, as far as I knew, there was no etiquette to cover that situation. I just acted polite and businesslike and tried not to seem stiff.” When he didn’t say anything, I added, “It’s not like I was his only ex-girlfriend in the department. I knew about two definites and a couple of maybes before me and one after me. None of them got fired.”

I waited. For all I could tell, he was taking down my conversation in longhand, or maybe he’d put down the phone and gone to get a cup of coffee. Finally he spoke. “What about Lisa Golding? Was she in any position to get you fired?”

“Of course not. From time to time I got information from her. Conducted interviews because she wasn’t much of a writer. There must have been ten or twenty people outside the department who did projects with us that I had those kinds of dealings with.”

I was running my nail through the nap of the rug. The cleaning woman who worked for my parents in East Hampton was doing a commendable job. Just then, my parents tripped down the stairs. I gave them a half wave, half shrug, indicating I had no out. I was stuck on this call. Both of them smiled and waved back with their fingers: See you whenever! Sometimes they seemed more yin and yang aspects of the same being rather than two separate people.

All this thinking took place in an instant. Maybe a little longer, considering the length of Jacques’s conversational hiatuses. “Was there any connection between Lisa and Archie Edwards or Lisa and Ben Mattingly?” he asked.

“Not that I know of. I don’t think so. She was in ICD, the International Cooperation Detail, the unit that got foreign nationals settled here. Huff told me it has a different name now.”

“They’re good at that.”

“I wasn’t around long enough to find out. Anyway, Lisa might have gotten instructions from Archie or Ben on dealing with the people our unit had sponsored. More likely she got them from whomever her boss was.”

“So she never had a go with Mattingly?” he asked.

“No. I can’t give you a written guarantee, but I can’t imagine anyone who was less his type. He seemed to like women with minds.” I wondered if Jacques was thinking, Yeah, minds he can fuck with. “And as far as Archie went—”

“He didn’t,” Jacques said. “All right, as to that foreign threesome we’d been discussing …” I got up and hurried back to the kitchen. My mother kept a pen and pad on the counter. “So far all I’ve been able to find out were the original names of the other two. One of them was fairly high up in the SED.” That was the communist party in East Germany, the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands. “His name was Hans Pfannenschmidt.”

“Bet he was glad for the chance to get his name changed!”

It was embarrassing to say something and anticipate an empathetic chuckle and get zilch. Jacques went on: “He was the party’s liaison to the criminal justice system and the courts.”

“His name doesn’t ring a bell. Part of it is that my German is close to nonexistent, so I didn’t retain a lot. I was always trying so hard to translate in my head that my comprehension was even more limited.”

“I noticed,” Jacques said. “When I had the documents up on the monitor, you were looking too hard. I didn’t think you were getting anything beyond a sentence or two.”

“You turned around?” So much for my keen powers of observation.

“Yes. You were having trouble making it out. And moving your lips trying to read. Your accent is probably lousy.”

“Atrocious. What’s the name of the third? Is it a woman? I remember Lisa buying shoes for an East German. A woman’s size seven.”

“Woman. Maria Kurz. She was the secretary to the head of the Presidium.”

“That was the smaller group that was over the Council of Ministers?” I asked.

“Yes, and the council was over the Politburo and the party congress. There were sixteen members of the Presidium. Maria Kurz wasn’t one of them, but from what I remember, she was more than just a secretary.”

“Could the three of them have been friends back in Deutschland?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have enough information. If I had to guess I’d say Manfred Gottesman could easily have known Hans Pfannenschmidt. Someone near the top of the Stasi could well have known the party’s liaison to the criminal justice system. Maria Kurz is simply a question mark.”

I closed my eyes. I could feel my energy draining. What were all these names going to do? Lead me to Lisa Golding, who, ninety-nine chances out of a hundred, would also lead me nowhere? The big thrill of the whole conversation was that I may have impressed Jacques by knowing what the Presidium was. That I had a nonsexual or maybe even sexual crush on a retiree, of all things, who was probably just a couple of years younger than my father really creeped me out. D and D, as my sister and I used to whisper to each other when we observed anyone or anything that didn’t meet our sophisticated and pristine standards. Dumb and dees-gusting.

“What now?” I managed to ask. There’s nothing more to be done. That’s what I was sure, or hoping very hard, would be his next sentence.

“I’ll see if I can pick up anything on their current identities,” Jacques said. “If not, at least the identities they were given when they first came here. Now,” he snapped, very militarily, “your job: sleep on it. Maybe you’ll have a brainstorm.”

“And your job,” I snapped back. “Try and think of a way to track down Lisa. I can’t stop worrying.”

“So I’ve noticed.”

THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, I lay beside Adam in our bedroom at my parents’ house in the Hamptons and had a brainstorm. Not about anything useful, like recalling the new names of the two Germans left standing, but about Jacques and Huff. Was Jacques’s telling me Huff thought I’d gotten a raw deal the truth? Maybe Huff had told him I was a superbitch but gullible as hell when it came to matters of espionage. Do me a favor, Huff had requested, let her go chasing down to North Carolina … for nothing. Put on a little show for her. Get her hopes up. Payback for being so snotty with me — downright nasty—ordering me to do her legwork, trying to get me to believe it was for Spy Guys.

When I tried to think about something else, I started on how hard a time Dani would give me on the final episode. I’d gotten off a first draft to Oliver. He’d said, “Not bad,” but Dani and Javiero would read it over the weekend. Javiero would probably ask for one more fight to show off His Highness’s fearlessness and pectorals. Dani would come into the Monday morning meeting and, first thing, exhale slowly and say to me, I assume you know what ruined my weekend?

Moonlight lit the fields in a way that made it look as if the luminescence were not coming from the sky, but from a glow in the tall grass. Adam, deep in sleep, smiled. I glanced down the blanket: not an erotic dream. Maybe a dream about zebras. He dreamed of them often and loved them with unscientific passion. Whenever he recounted these dreams, the zebras sounded imbued with magic, like mythological creatures. Grazing on a golden savanna, they were his unicorns. On awakening, he was always delighted when he remembered they were real.

I wished I could have switched my brainstorm for his dreams. No, because I wouldn’t wish what was going through my head on Adam. Forget my usual Spy Guys angst. Here I was, in the grip of an obsession that had nothing to do with the life I was now living, relying on a stranger who lived alone in the middle of a forest —like a troll with family money —and I had no idea whether he was okay or a liar.

That “Trust your gut” credo was fine for creating a character or arguing a plot point with Oliver. But my gut wasn’t working very well in this world of real agents and double agents, ops and multiple identities. How could I trust it? And not just gut. Brain, perceptivity, judgment, sixth sense: my usual assets were out to lunch. All I could rely on was faith. If I couldn’t believe in the guy who said he was helping me as a favor to his friend Huff, there was nothing I could do.

Adam turned onto his side. I moved in close and put my arm around him, feeling grateful for his solidity—his common sense, his integrity, his lean and hardy physical self. He was warm, but the day had cooled off into a sweet, humid, hair-kinking night. I could smell the ocean a quarter mile away, the fabric softener in my mother’s well-laundered pillowcases.

“You okay?” he murmured.

“Fine. Go back to sleep.”

Saturday night we ditched my parents and went out to dinner with friends who were similarly sponging off their parents. At one point, we were arguing about Bush, Rumsfeld, and Iraq, drinking wine, gesticulating so dramatically with forks that strands of linguine flew into the air, laughing when Adam declared us not only knee-jerk New York liberals but boring knee-jerk New York liberals. I poured myself a depraved third glass of wine and gave myself a figurative pat on the back: I was having fun. I had a good marriage. Excellent! Move on, I’d told myself, and indeed I had. Until a few minutes later when my cell phone rang. I forced myself not to think that Nicky had been in some hideous accident or had been caught with black-market M&Ms and was being sent home. I choked out a hello and heard, “Harlow.”

I covered the mic with my thumb, told everyone, “Spy Guys crisis,” and walked from the noisy, basil-scented room out the door. Valets were parking so many Mercedeses that it looked like SS Reunion Nacht in Munich.

“Hi, Jacques,” I said.

“Where are you?”

“I just walked outside a restaurant.”

“Where?” Jacques demanded.

“You know, if this were my show I’d be having one of the leads in front of a computer with a triangulation program, and in two seconds there’d be an extreme close-up on the screen and it would say ‘East Hampton.’“

“How realistic,” he murmured. “I have two names for you. Do you need to get a piece of paper?”

“I can remember them,” I said coolly, and suddenly felt my linguine vongole solidify into a nauseating mass south of my esophagus. What if I couldn’t?

“Remember Hans Pfannenschmidt? He had problems in the first couple of cities they sent him to, but he wound up in Minneapolis.”

“Were you able to get the name he got when he came here?”

“Yes.” I waited. “Bernard Ritter.”

“Do you know anything about him?” I asked. “What he does?”

“What he did. Nothing as glamorous as a candy millionaire. He was a salesman for a company that manufactured brake fluid.”

“You said ‘what he did.’ Is he retired? Or dead or something?”

“Dead. In his office, about six weeks ago, the end of May. He was working late. Stabbed to death.”

“Oh my God!”

“Police are clueless. Nothing on any of the security cameras, but those are at all the entrances and in the elevators, not in the offices themselves. No enemies. Family man, wife dead several years ago, but two children in school in Minneapolis.”

“How awful!” I said. “What do you think?”

“Strange. Interesting. Pick one. Then put that up against a simple coincidence, two of the three dying so close together, one from a nasty illness and the other by violence.”

Bernard Ritter Minneapolis late May, I said to myself, praying I wouldn’t forget. “And Maria?” Naturally I had a 24 image of an exploding Volkswagen, instantly followed by another of a gray-haired woman choking to death in a cloud of ricin.

“Maria Kurz is still Maria. Her last name is Schneider. Never heard of anyone getting a new identity and keeping their old name.”

“Could it be some subtle ploy?” I asked.

“A ploy maybe. I don’t see what’s subtle about it. And to save you from asking, she’s alive, fine, apparently. Sells real estate in Tallahassee.” He paused and then said, “I’m assuming you know where Tallahassee is.”

“Of course I know. Florida. Where in Florida?”

He sighed. “About where the Florida Panhandle begins. South of Georgia. How did you get out of elementary school?”

“I got out loaded down with prizes in everything except geography.”

“And German,” he said. “Okay, that’s it for me. Good-bye.”

Before I could find my voice, he added, “Well, you can call me if you get desperate, but I can’t think of anything more I can do for you.”

When I called the public affairs office of the Minneapolis Police Department that Monday morning, I was hoping to hear a honeyed yet quirky voice like Frances McDormand’s in Fargo. Instead, I got one of those happy guys who made his hello into a three-syllable word: “Hel-lo-oh!”

So I managed an effusive “Hello!” back and gave him my QTV, Spy Guys, Dani Barber and Javiero Rojas spiel. I probably could have gotten information out of him based on that, but he was actually a fan of the show so I gave him a story about using Bernard Ritter as the basis for a future episode, how an innocent, admirable immigrant came to a terrible, lonely end in his promised land. I added how he, Sergeant Dave Whatever, would get his name in the end credits if we were able to use the material, but even if we couldn’t, how very grateful we all would be, including, without a doubt, Dani Barber. And, oh yes, she would be happy to sign a picture for him. Since Dani thought autographing photos was tasteless, she’d have her assistant sign, “To Dave, Warmest personal regards, Dani.” He said he’d talk to the detectives involved and get back to me. He did in less than an hour.