Past Perfect (25 page)

“Any other cases like this?” I asked.

“No. Not before. Not after, so far. I’m not saying we haven’t had homicides in workplaces. But to the best of my recollection, not like this one. Not like where someone sneaks upstairs like that. I say ‘sneaks upstairs’ because Mr. Ritter worked on seven and there wasn’t anybody on the elevators who wasn’t eventually accounted for from morning on. Same thing with the video from the entrances and the parking lot. Not that we positively could identify everybody, but there’s nobody we could point to and say, ‘Let’s check him or her out.’“

“One of the reasons Mr. Ritter is such an appealing character is that he sounds like a good family man. Solid values.” Why I put on that annoyingly wholesome persona when speaking to people outside the Washington-New York-Boston corridor was one of life’s mysteries. “What’s the family like?”

“Let’s see what it says here …” Dave made little murmurs indicating speed-reading. “Son, twelve, good student, not a troublemaker. Daughter, ten, pretty much the same thing.”

“I understand his wife died?”

“Four years ago. Massive heart attack. In her early forties. Can you believe such bad luck? Her sister is going to take the kids. Sad.”

“It is sad. Do you happen to have any information on what Mr. Ritter did before he left Germany?”

I had to wait while he went through the material. “He worked for a tire company. A German offshoot of Michelin tires. Says here he was a salesman. I guess once you’re a salesman, you know what you’re good at. By all accounts, he was a friendly, outgoing guy.”

“Had there been any problems in his life? Women, drinking, gambling? I don’t know, maybe some weird person stalking him or something.”

“That’s the thing,” Dave said. “No trouble anywhere. There was no nicer guy. Everybody had a good word for him. You know, you talk about immigrants. This is just the kind of person you want to come here.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. Those high-ranking communist bureaucrats made such good Americans. “A sad ending to a heartwarming story.”

And that left Maria.

“QTV IS PLEASED to announce that its hit series Spy Guys has been picked up for an unprecedented sixth season,” the press release on my desk chair read. I smirked at hit and rolled my eyes for unprecedented.

Attached to it was a note from Oliver on his personalized, ultra-thick stationery. It was covered with pale blue squares, so it looked like graph paper for high-class algebraists. Occasionally I imagined him drawing, in different color inks, his own, Dani’s, and Javiero’s value lines sloping up almost vertically, while mine would plunge beyond the deckle edge at the bottom of the paper. Meanwhile, I read, “Congrats. Done deal. Remember I told you last y”ear your next raise wasn’t for the next two years even if we got picked up again and we did. Best, O.”

I put it into my To Be Filed basket, a cute wicker number lined in the toile fabric of my office. While my computer booted up, I jotted down two columns on a notepad.

BAD GUYS BAD ACT

Philippine radical Islamists blow up congressional delegations while they’re visiting Iraqi hospital

Colombian drug dealers digging tunnel under U.S. embassy in Manila

crazed British animal rights people meeting in Cape Town to plan sabotage of American submarine

Indian pharmaceutical company making degraded blood pressure medicine planning on putting poison in the vats of America’s leading tofu manufacturer

I figured that it would take me about twenty minutes to generate a list long enough that I’d have the whole sixth season. All I’d have to do was draw a line from anything in column A to anything in column B. Then I knitted my eyebrows together and pursed my lips slightly, that intelligent writer’s expression I’d seen in movies about Lillian Hellman and Virginia Woolf. That done, I went to Google and typed: Tallahassee real estate “Maria Schneider.” And there she was, phone number and all, at Orange Blossom Realtors.

“Hello, this is Maria Schneider,” her voice mail announced brightly. “I’m either on the phone or out with a client. If you leave your name, number, and a short message, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.” She didn’t sound like my idea of an East German hotshot. Her voice was adorable, just short of sex-kittenish, like Elke Sommer’s in The Venetian Affair. She sounded blond, though if she’d been a heavy hitter in the Presidium and not just a secretary with a steno pad, she must be at least in her fifties, a tad past the age of kittenhood.

“Hi, Ms. Schneider. My name is Katherine Schottland.” Should I say I was a writer? No, she could think I was an investigative reporter and there were periods of her life she didn’t want investigated. “It’s a long, complex story which I’ll be glad to tell you when we talk, but I got your number from …” Why hadn’t I rehearsed this? Should I say I got her number from the Internet based on information given to me by a former Defense Intelligence Agency spook? “… Lisa Golding. I’m a little concerned about her and I would appreciate it if you could give me a call, whether or not you have information.” I gave her my cell, home, and office numbers. “Thanks so much.” I threw in a “Bye!” based on my observation that Germans are always saying, “Auf Wiedersehen,” to each other in such happy voices, as if parting was what they liked to do best.

A minute after I called her, I wished I could take it back. She’d probably never heard the name Lisa Golding, as Agency people dealing with outsiders would often use pseudonyms. Of the three East Germans Lisa had tutored, one had been murdered and another had died mysteriously from a rare fungus. Maybe Manfred-turned-Dick had contracted his fatal disease splashing around in organism-rich Ohio River mud, but there was a chance someone could have given him blastomycosis to kill him. To kill him cleverly, because if a Cincinnati sportsman was going to die in some obscure manner, it wouldn’t make sense to inject typhoid bacteria into his tube of Colgate; no, give him something local. (I did like the thought of infecting a tube of toothpaste, so I added to my notes, Injects typhoid into teeny toothpaste tube samples handed out at the Republican convention. Then, & Democratic, so as not to seem partisan.)

Even if I couldn’t really believe that someone had murdered Dick Schroeder, I knew that Hans Pfannenschmidt-Bernard Ritter hadn’t stabbed himself to death. So if someone was out to stop Lisa from talking—and considered getting rid of those Germans as part of that job—then why had I left my number with Maria? Not just my cell, my home and office numbers also. They’d be tapping her phones. I’d done everything for them except spell my last name.

The shudder that went through me began somewhere between my heart and my stomach, but immediately surged to my head and rushed to my feet. I did recover almost immediately, shaking off the terror, yet I sensed that recovery was merely some ancient self-preservation instinct at work to allow me to keep going. The truth was, getting frightened was a proper response to death by violence and death by bizarre organism. Wasn’t it? On the odd chance that Maria returned my call and her future killers were listening in, I decided to simply say, Yeah, well, Lisa did sound upset, but I overreacted. Sorry to have bothered you, but you know Lisa. Drama, drama, drama.

I may have been staring at my computer screen nearly the whole time I was thinking, but now I really looked at it. I started typing a list of the sets for some future episode, but after “EXT. DOORWAY IN CAIRO —NIGHT” (which naturally would be some vertical-planked doorway the set designers put up and sandpapered to look etched by years of North African weather), my left hand reached out to the phone on my desk. Except who was I going to call?

I could picture Adam’s beeper going off in the middle of his Monday pathology meeting and him calling me back so I could tell him how I lied to him about North Carolina and then talking for an hour to bring him up to date on my craziness. Of all the people I knew, he was the most balanced. But he’d suggested —and would have ordered if he’d come from an earlier generation—that I forget about Lisa, the CIA. So not Adam. Of course not Adam.

Forget my parents. My mother would react more calmly than my father, but their only response would be horror. Whether they shrieked silently or out loud, spoke judiciously or hysterically: Someone you knew at the CIA vanished? And someone was stabbed to death? And another one died from a rare fungus? Oh my God, Katie honey! Definitely not my parents.

Dix, on the other hand, was tough-minded and understanding at the same time. He knew why I couldn’t let this go, probably more clearly than I did. His first reaction wouldn’t be to demand, Are you insane? or to declare, Sister sweetie, you are over the top. That was the problem. Dix was a little too much like me. For us, life itself and what was on page or screen tended to have the same weight. Depending on the situation we were in, we’d reflexively compare what we were living to some art form.

Give us a profoundly dark or sad period in our lives and we’d think, Russian novel, or bleak, three-hour Japanese film. Dix coming out and breaking up with Maddy was Ingmar Bergman, but also a little ninety-minute romantic comedy with him as Cary Grant pursuing a young Marlon Brando in construction worker gear; he probably believed the divorce was good for Maddy, because she would wind up with an intellectual Jimmy Stewart. If I tried to explain Jacques to Dix, or attempted to get Dix to help me figure why, out of all the communists in East Berlin, these three had gotten a free pass (plus two of them had also gotten a big deceased stamped on their case file), he, as I, might wind up analogizing it to a two-hour thriller that, unfortunately, would not star Matt Damon.

I went back to my script and got lost in it until early evening. The night went well. Adam and I finished a bottle of Zinfandel and made love on the living room floor, which was a little hard on my back, but pretty wild except for one thrashing-about, screaming moment when Flippy trotted in to save whichever one of us needed saving. While we didn’t awaken the next morning in each other’s arms, both of us wore the goofy morning smiles that come after a night of great sex. So maybe I was recovering from my obsession after all. Whatever was, was. Let it be.

Naturally, I couldn’t. At eight-thirty, as I pulled out of the garage to go to work, I called my sister, the smartest person I knew, and asked if I could come over.

Maddy viewed hospitality as a weakness. Its sole purpose was to get people to love or admire you using food or the paraphernalia of gracious living—mother-of-pearl napkin rings, silver candlesticks —as a way to distract them from experiencing your essence. Actually, when she and Dix had been together they had thrown wonderful dinner parties, complete with a collection of porcelain espresso cups and itty-bitty spoons. Maybe she’d decided dinner parties were gay, because after he left she had no more. Or she could have been making a statement: My father’s business is selling the unnecessary to the frivolous and I want no part of such frippery. In any case, anyone who knew her soon learned not to drop by her place hungry. Or thirsty.

To get a cup of coffee, I met her in front of her building. We walked a block and a half, passing a Starbucks and a coffee shop that came complete with a counter, stools, and the heady aroma of percolating coffee. “Not here. Around the corner,” she said. “They have tables outside.” Maddy was trying. She’d spruced up. Her bangs were brushed off her forehead and, except for an oval in the back that was still matted from sleep, her hair was smooth, brown with its natural copper highlights.

The place did have tables outside, and they were pretty clean. The same could not be said of the sidewalk beneath, so we made our way around a great gathering of feasting pigeons and sat on those woven chairs they have outside Parisian cafés. Rather than rattan, they were fabricated from some soft plastic, so when we sat we immediately slid toward the front of the seats. As we righted ourselves, a waitress in a black miniskirt, white shirt, and a cotton scarf or handkerchief tied around her throat emerged. I guess her getup was supposed to evoke Gene Kelly in An American in Paris, but to me it said the café was a tourist trap. The coffee confirmed it, and considering how decent coffee could now be had on any block in the city, I couldn’t figure how such a place stayed in business. We were the only ones seated outside: word of mouth had obviously spread to everyone south of Fourteenth Street except my sister. She had a gift for zeroing in on the worst restaurant in any venue.

The croissant Maddy ordered was the size of a pro basketball player’s sneaker. I appropriated a pinch of it and found it tasted more pastry than shoe, but only slightly. She dropped a couple of dollops of jam on a large piece, but before popping it into her mouth said, “See? I gave you my oath. I’m still alive, so this might be a good time to harangue me about carbs.”

“Too predictable.” I poured a little more milk into my coffee.

“I told you I wasn’t that bad, that I’d been much worse.”

“At the risk of you thinking I’m even a bigger egomaniac than I actually am,” I said, “this isn’t about you. This is about me.”

“Go ahead,” she said warily. More caution than lack of interest, I guessed, though I wasn’t sure if it was concern that I might demand too much of her or suspicion I might be diverting her in the interest of her mental health.

“I need your advice,” I told her.

“On what?”

“Remember when I told you all about Lisa Golding’s call and about going to visit that guy in Cincinnati?”

“Katie, do you think I take an eraser and wipe away the day’s memories every night?”

One of the millions of self-help books I’d read over the years had a short list of items to cut from your vocabulary, and one of them was for once in your life can you/can’t you. That left me with nothing to say for a moment, during which she gave me a jut of chin and a narrowing of eye to let me know she wouldn’t take it back. “No, Maddy, I don’t think you erase, okay? So let me bring you up to date. Here’s the math: three East Germans to whom Lisa showed the ropes on living in the U.S., minus the dead guy in Cincinnati, leaves two. Take away one from two—”