Past Perfect (30 page)

By that time, when Ben was off to Berlin so often, he and I had been split for more than a year. I was married to Adam. Happily. Still, I couldn’t forget how my feelings for Ben welled up when I saw how worn he looked. I wanted to put my arms around him and comfort him. Okay, so it wasn’t just sweetie, baby, snooky-pie solace. I imagined him recognizing, as he broke down in my arms and wept from sheer exhaustion, that this was what he had tossed away: a woman who had a magnificent balance of heart and mind.

I opened the lock to our section of the crypt. Everything neat as I’d left it, all the wicker baskets and rattan boxes stacked up, the sheet over the treadmill. This time I couldn’t afford to sit and leaf through my notes. Adam could stay in the shower for only so long, and since I was already feeling terrible about keeping my trip to D.C. a secret, I wasn’t going to compound my guilt by staying downstairs long enough to make him suspect I was not in the mood. Which I was not.

I got out my economics texts and rushed through my notes. A couple of times I almost ripped a page in my hurry to get out of there. Sure enough, I had noted Ben’s trips to Berlin with a “B2B.” I couldn’t believe I had done anything that obvious; it had all the subtlety of a sixteen-year-old writing in her diary, “I F Joey tonite.” I actually was writing such insipid stuff after I was married? Yes indeed. The evidence was right there on the page. I read the dates out loud: “October sixth, October twentieth, November third, November seventeenth, December first.” That led to a quick head/fingers calculation. At that time, when all the protests were breaking out in East Germany and soon after, when the Wall had come down, Ben had been going to Berlin every other week. Wow, I’d forgotten it was so often. There had been B2B trips earlier than that; now, quickly checking, I realized those had occurred regularly as well, every two or three months.

When I got upstairs, the shower was still going. Grateful, I hurried to the computer and brought up a 1989 calendar. Each time, late in ’89, Ben had left Washington on a Friday. Every two weeks. I wasn’t sure whether he’d flown on commercial or government aircraft, but I had zero memory of him being out of the office the following weeks. Definitely nothing in my notes about it. But why would he have gone on a weekend?

Even if he was willing to forfeit his Saturdays and Sundays, why would he want to go to Berlin on those days? Whatever he was doing, getting briefed, talking to operatives or diplomats, wouldn’t he be better off doing it during the workweek, when offices were open? Sure, those months in ’89 had been crisis time, but even then, some bureaus and departments must have been closed on weekends.

I got up from the computer and walked slowly into the bedroom. No sound of water from the shower. I had to think fast. Why would someone from the Agency travel to Berlin over a weekend? Perhaps to see a person or people there who could not meet during the week. If you had secret business to take care of, you went there at a time that was safer for the people you were dealing with. Like Hans, Manfred, and Maria.

Or maybe —I heard Adam putting his towel back on the rack. Maybe what? All that control I’d observed this morning, Ben’s mastery of muscle and expression. What was I looking at? An operative’s training. Could it be he had been using his desk job, deputy chief of the Office of Eastern Europe Analysis, as a cover for other work? Like work as a CIA clandestine op?

THERE MUST HAVE BEEN limits to the delights of shooting coyotes and admiring neighborhood mountains, because when I told Jacques Harlow I could not go back down to North Carolina, and please, could we talk about this on the phone, he let out a deep sigh and said, “I’ll come up.”

An immediate image of him with a dirty duffel bag full of hideous tourist clothes, like Bermuda shorts, support socks, and FDNY Tshirts sprang up. He’d ring my doorbell, expecting to stay at the apartment for a night or two. Before I could suggest a place for him to stay, he’d barrel past me with an electronic bug sweeper and ask, in a loud voice that Adam couldn’t help but hear, Is your husband in town?

He called me the following afternoon from the Peninsula, a good hotel in Midtown, and asked me to meet him for dinner. I expected someplace out of the way, like eastern Queens, or over-the-top tacky, serving NASCAR-themed food. To my surprise, we wound up at a Mediterranean bistro I knew well, three blocks from my parents’ apartment on the Upper East Side. It was casual and noisy, one of those neighborhood places, overpriced naturally, where everybody knows everybody —Applebee’s for the rich.

“I remember coming here for the first time when I was ten or eleven,” I told Jacques. “It was a lesser coming-of-age ritual. You had to have the self-control to sit with both sides of your” —I pointed to my butt—“on your chair for the entire meal, and that meant from Shirley Temple through dessert.”

“I didn’t realize it had a history for you,” Jacques said. “Do you want a Shirley Temple?”

“Some form of white wine would be fine.”

He ordered a single-malt scotch, neat. Between that and his shirt with minuscule black-and-white checks and a black sweater tossed over his shoulders, he was fitting so perfectly into the scene that he might have been coached in the Park and Seventy-sixth lifestyle by someone like Lisa.

“Remember I told you it was unlikely that Lisa and Ben knew each other very well?” I asked.

“Yes, but don’t tell me now.” I glanced around. No one was passing by to overhear me, and though I’d waved to my parents’ friends Jane and Jonathan on the way to our table, they were far enough from us that even had they been tempted, which I couldn’t imagine, they couldn’t have heard what we were saying. I couldn’t see anyone studiously avoiding looking at us —the dead giveaway of eavesdropping in espionage novels. All I got was a wink and a micro-smile from a guy I knew from when I’d been on the board of the Writers Guild who obviously thought I’d been staring at him. “I’m not worried about anyone listening,” Jacques explained. “Huff should be here any minute.”

He downed his scotch fast, as if it were apple juice, then signaled for another. I wasn’t surprised that he was one of those men waiters tune in on, and his second drink all but flew over. After two sips of my Sancerre, I put the glass down on the yellow tablecloth. The restaurant’s palette was yellow and blue, which to me has always said Sweden; when I’d been fifteen and obnoxious, I’d inquired about it and the owner told me they said sun and sea to him.

During a lull in our conversation, I kept myself amused with a little anxiety, like imagining Jacques ordering a third drink, followed by a fourth, then being loud and slurry enough to blurt out something to mortify me, probably about Jews. Or he might scoot his chair right beside mine and, in a repulsively sloppy old-guy fashion, drape his arm around me and let his left hand dangle over my boob. My face was feeling hot from the awfulness of it, but then the maitre d’ brought Huff to the table.

“He knows what I know,” Jacques told me as Huff sat.

“Does that mean you know what I told Jacques?” I asked Huff.

“Right.” Huff sat beside me. No Lisa-style lessons on how to fit in for him. His shirt was a stiff khaki that could have come from the wardrobe department during the shoot of Five Graves to Cairo. He ordered Bombay Sapphire gin, chilled, no ice, which sounded pleasingly spyish.

“I told her to wait until you got here,” Jacques said. Huff put his tongue on his canine tooth and nodded. “Do you want to get started?” Jacques asked me. “Don’t worry about talking in front of Huff. He’ll keep quiet. Not a word to your show. I told him if he didn’t keep his mouth shut, I’d kill him.” That seemed good for a laugh. While they chuckled away, I reached for a breadstick. “Go ahead,” Jacques told me.

“You’re not doing this because I got a raw deal, are you?” I asked.

“You and a lot of people got raw deals,” Huff said. “Shit happens.”

“Let’s put it this way,” Jacques said, “you happened to come along. This is no formal thing, no cabal of ex-ops righting wrongs and all that. But Huff and I… we want to see justice done. Why wouldn’t we? The intelligence community has a terrible rap, and it didn’t just begin in 2001. No doubt about it, we did make mistakes that cost lives. We badly misjudged certain situations. But we also made some brilliant calls and performed in ways nobody gives us credit for. With the secrecy of our work, we can’t take credit. What galls me is that over the years, people have come to see everything we do as illegitimate. Any half-assed conspiracy theory on the Internet about the American intelligence community is considered one hundred percent credible.”

“Sometimes you deserve the hit. Tenet and Iraq,” I said.

“How fucked up was that?” Huff agreed.

“Sometimes we do deserve it,” Jacques told me. “But you’ve got to distinguish between the political decisions that are made by a few people in the directorate of an intelligence agency and the recommendations from knowledgeable people those few didn’t listen to. When the few ignore or misinterpret the work of the many, is everyone to blame?”

“No,” I said. “But if an institution can be so screwed up by its management, then that institution isn’t doing us much good.”

“Well,” Huff began. Then he stopped.

I peered down. I had finished my wine. Jacques signaled the waiter and pointed to my glass. “I’m assuming what you’re saying about the few people who make decisions contrary to all the great advice and scholarship they’re offered has something to do with Benton Mattingly.”

“Yes,” Jacques said. Huff tapped his chest to signal me too. “He was one of the few. Smooth, smart, and incredibly cagey. And dangerously wrong.”

“But he hasn’t been in the Agency for years,” I said. “So what does it matter?”

“You’re not in the Agency anymore either,” Jacques said, “and it seems to matter to you.”

Considering how quickly I’d been to brush off whatever their beef against Ben was, I realized how amazing it was that Jacques and Huff were helping me. Then I decided the word amazing should be replaced with lucky. But since I had no idea what they themselves were getting out of helping me, I wasn’t up for luck either. Between the double whammy of all those spy novels and movies—Treachery! Intrigue! Wickedness beyond your wildest dreams!—and my experience of getting fired, caution kicked in. Maybe even their “helping” wasn’t accurate. Maybe they were leading me to a place I shouldn’t go.

For all I knew, when I’d first asked Huff for information about Lisa, he might have run and told Ben. And maybe Ben said, Go ahead. Lead her on. And bring Harlow into this. He can control a loose cannon. I could have innocently stumbled into the middle of some huge cover-up of a dastardly plot I’d never even heard of. By the same token, maybe I was having dinner with two demented retirees who would sneak out after the nougat mousse leaving me with nothing except the check.

Despite all those nasty possibilities, I believed these two were on my side. I had never been superstitious, but that day, that night, all signs felt right. I could trust these guys. Why? I didn’t know. The world itself felt auspicious. It was a perfect July evening. Still hot. The buildings wouldn’t let go of the day’s heat. Only an occasional damp breath of cooler air came down the side streets from the East River. No one could walk a block without getting a patina of moisture on her face. Since the time I was old enough to get out of going to summer camp, I had worn that sweat proudly. It separated me from the weenies who still had to go to camp, from the wusses who started fleeing Manhattan after Memorial Day.

Another good sign was that I’d escaped having to lie to Adam about going out. He’d called a little before three and asked if I minded if he went to see a Yankees-Angels game with a pathologist friend from Montefiore Hospital. An hour later, an e-mail from Nicky began with “I learned to sail!! Me and Nathan and the sailing counselor Aalbert that’s a funny way to spell it but he’s from Holland sailed across the lake to Camp Chipinaw!!!!” I was on a roll, so I chose to believe Jacques and Huff were out to help me. Neither the Scarlet Pimpernel nor Jack Ryan would make a decision that way. My own His Highness would mock it. Jamie would demand, How can you be such a moron?

“I spoke to Maria Schneider,” I told them. “She suggested I ask Ben about where Lisa might be.”

“Ben?” Huff pulled back his head in surprise.

“Maria said Lisa and Ben had been lovers for years. She didn’t actually say ‘lovers.’ They’d been together, was what she said. More a marriage than a marriage.” Jacques too seemed taken aback at the news, and it did appear to be news to them both. They were nodding slowly with a similar brows-brought-together expression of concentration.

“Of course,” I added, “Maria could be lying. She could be misinterpreting what she heard. Or there’s another possibility. Maybe she was just repeating a lie that Lisa told her.”

“We know that,” Jacques said. I was surprised by his tone, which wasn’t snide. Close to courteous. “When you’re not sure what you’re dealing with, any fact can have an enormous number of interpretations. Just get the facts out first.”

“After I talked to Maria, I remembered back to when I was there, at the Agency. Lisa had pumped me for information about Ben. It struck me then she might have a thing for him, but she was so not his type. He liked very bright women, because to fully grasp his wonderfulness, you had to have brains, along with some interest in geopolitics, or at least the ability to fake it. Lisa wasn’t dumb by any means, but not at all book smart. She just had an amazing ability to read style and to remake anybody to match their new identity.”

“Did you ever meet any of the people she remade?” Jacques asked.

“No. But everything I ever heard about her indicated she was a whiz at her job. Still, she was superficial in that she wasn’t interested in what was going on in the world, unless it was a handbag sale in Paris.”

“Maybe it was pure sex with him and Lisa,” Huff said.

“Even if pure sex can stay hot for more than fifteen years, I never saw Lisa as someone who could be hot to anyone. Just her voice alone: it would have been like doing Minnie Mouse. Who knows? Maybe there was something magical about her for him, but even then, how did he find time for her, much less energy? He had the Agency, his Deedee life, and he was involved with someone from our unit at least seventy-five percent of the time.”