Past Perfect (31 page)

“How often would Ben have dealt with Lisa on CIA business?” Jacques asked.

“I can’t say for sure, because all I knew were the cases I was assigned to write about. Even though Lisa’s unit was nicknamed the Welcome Wagon, I can’t imagine the Agency was bringing over hundreds of people from Eastern Europe to settle here. And her unit wasn’t just servicing us. They had all the other units, people coming in from all over the world, to deal with. So my guess is, Ben and Lisa dealt with each other on a case no more than a few times a year. Even then, Ben would have been dealing less with her than with her boss. That doesn’t mean that they couldn’t have fallen madly in love and had a long-term affair. It just means they didn’t work together a lot.”

The waiter came and handed us menus. “What’s good here?” Jacques asked.

“Pretty much anything, except they have a meat loaf they call à la Greque. Loaded with raisins. It’s fairly dreadful.”

“All right,” said Jacques as he ran his eyes down the menu, then set it aside. “Maybe they were having an affair. Or some sort of working relationship you didn’t know about.”

“It’s possible. He went to Eastern Europe a lot, every other month for a long time. From what I know, he always stopped in Berlin. That would have made sense in the late eighties. And toward the end of eighty-nine, he began going to Berlin every two weeks. On weekends. So this is what I was wondering.” I didn’t say to Jacques, Tell me if this sounds crazy, because I had no doubt he would. “Do you think it’s possible that besides being second in command of our unit, dealing with Eastern European intelligence, he could also have been using his job as a cover for some sort of clandestine operation? I mean, the Soviets would know he was in Berlin, but they’d yawn and say, ‘Boring intel guy is here again.’”

Huff seemed on the verge of answering, but whether by a signal I missed or prearrangement, he kept quiet. Jacques said, “I’ll tell you what I thought at the time. I was in Berlin during the late eighties. Don’t forget, it wasn’t just us versus the Soviets there. There were the French and British sectors also. Militarily, it was a potential nightmare. It also had the possibility of being a dream, because the USSR was changing so fast, stepping down its commitments in Eastern Europe. Mattingly came to Berlin regularly enough that some of us suspected he was running an operation, but certainly not anything big enough to require real watching. I viewed it as the harmless little hobby of a desk-bound bureaucrat. My guess was he had a connection with somebody out of Poland because of his expertise on the Solidarity movement.”

“I didn’t know that about him,” I said. “I mean, that he was an expert on Solidarity.”

“He wasn’t an academic, but he had quite a bit of knowledge about postwar Polish politics. In any case, I assumed his contact was someone high up in the Polish government who knew the plans for dealing with the Solidarity movement. But about a month before the Wall came down, I heard about Mattingly coming more often. On weekends. That’s when I started to think he was running an agent in the Soviet sector and that whoever he was, he wasn’t a high-ranking Polish diplomat or official. The Poles saw the writing on the wall. They weren’t rushing to visit Berlin. Whoever Mattingly was running would be an East German, someone also reading the tea leaves a hell of a lot better than Ben was. The East German knew it was just a matter of days or weeks before his government went down in flames. If that happened, he’d be done for. He wanted out, and fast.”

I was so absorbed with what Jacques was saying that when the waiter came back and asked, “Are you ready to order?” I let out a squeal of surprise. That led Jacques and Huff to glance at each other. Amateur night, they were telling each other silently. The waiter mumbled, “Be back in a few when ya ready to order.”

“So I think you are on target about Mattingly using his job as an analyst and adviser as a cover for some kind of an operation,” Jacques went on. “What I’ve been wondering is whether your friend Lisa was involved in it.”

“I don’t know. She claimed she was an army brat. Another time she said she was the daughter of a troubleshooter for an American company in Europe, had gone to a Swiss boarding school. If the Europe part of it had a kernel of truth, she might have spoken several languages. That could have been useful to him.”

“Everyone in the Agency speaks at least a couple of languages,” Huff declared, obviously never having seen my file. “That’s no big deal.”

“What was a big deal,” I said, “was that her job required her to move around all the time, to stay in whatever area she was settling someone for weeks. If she was working with Ben, her assignment with the Welcome Wagon was a built-in excuse for being away from the office. If they were lovers, they could meet anywhere —here, Europe —and have a tryst. The lover thing would have been a major time management problem for Ben in D.C., because he had his wife and all her demands, plus taking care of whichever one of us from the unit he was seeing at the time.”

“Whether Lisa was his girlfriend or just on his team is irrelevant,” Jacques said, crossing over the border into impatience.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but it is relevant. If they’ve been involved romantically or emotionally for fifteen years plus, it’s one sort of tie. If he dumped her, that could have set her off. If they were paired by the Agency, then it’s possible that the call she made to me had something to do with —who the hell knows? —fearing something from him. There are so many choices: every one of them can produce a different plotline.”

“For Christ’s sake, stop talking like this is one of your television shows,” Jacques said. He was just short of snarling, and he shook his head and compressed his lips in that She’s hopeless manner. Huff worked on looking expressionless. Whatever their operation was, Jacques appeared to be running it.

“Don’t patronize me,” I told him. It’s bad enough to be looked down upon by some jerk, but ten times worse to be condescended to by someone you respect. “If one or both of them are motivated by love or anger or rejection or some other man-woman emotion, I can run rings around both of you when it comes to interpreting it.” I picked up a breadstick and snapped it, which admittedly was no great demonstration of power.

The waiter came and announced daily specials that sounded as if the chef had bought too much saffron. We ordered quickly, including another round of drinks, taking care only to distance ourselves from the Greek meat loaf.

“Let’s talk about that report you wrote, the one on the three Germans,” Jacques said. “Think back. Was there anything unusual about it? Did you ever write other reports about individuals your unit brought in to be resettled?”

“Yes. A few times. I didn’t view it as a major part of my job because it really dealt more with personalities than with issues. We had to write those sorts of things now and then because of some problem—a person we brought over was giving us a lot of trouble, like threatening to go to the press, or to go home and make a huge confession and beg for forgiveness. We’d write it to explain what happened, what we’d done to solve the problem. Usually there was to be a follow-up report at some point.”

“Was there a particular problem with any of these three?” Jacques asked.

“Now that you mention it, no. They had only been here a month or so, but I guess they were all doing well enough, considering.”

“Then how come the report?”

I closed my eyes and played with the hem of the tablecloth. Why had the report been requested? “Ben had me do it,” I said finally. “Well, he was the one who always gave me my marching orders. He told me to speak to Lisa because she could give a positive spin on how well the three were doing here. I guess the reason he wanted it written was … Give me a second to think.” I did the eye-closed/tablecloth-feeling business again. Then I said, “It had to be as a justification for all the money we spent on the operation. All Ben’s trips, settling them here. This wasn’t some Eastern European labor movement guy we slotted into a low-to middle-level job at the AFL-CIO. These were VIPs in East Germany. They needed more kid glove treatment, plus a lot of cash so they could give capitalism a shot. You had to treat them well. You can’t take someone who is one of the key players in the East German secret police like Gottesman, a supersmart guy who’s a genius at duplicity, and give him a job filling uniform requisition orders for the LAPD.”

“All three of them did all right here,” Huff observed. “I guess that says something about something. But I don’t know what.”

“This is what I think the ‘what’ is,” Jacques said. “From what Katie is saying and from what I’ve heard around—” The waiter came with our drinks. Jacques swirled his scotch, then took a sip. More of a slug; about half the whiskey evaporated. “After you left my place,” he told me, “I talked to a couple of friends who talked to a couple of their friends. As friends are wont to do.” I nodded. “What you’re describing to me is classic cover-your-ass intelligence community procedure. What that says to me is that Mattingly, in bringing those three here, had to have gone beyond standard operating procedure. Not only that, the cost must have been way out of line. Something was wrong, and he was trying to hide it, probably by overstating the Germans’ value to us and then bringing in Lisa to give it all a happy ending. You wrote that report when?”

“I think early February I990. Pretty soon after they came here. Come to think of it, I thought Lisa was overstating their great adjustment, because how much adjusting could they have done in a few weeks? The reason it stuck with me is even though Ben took it out of the report, Hans Pfannenschmidt couldn’t speak any English. That was a problem. Remember you told me they had to move him almost right away because he was so unhappy.”

“Did that move make it into the report?” Jacques asked.

“Of course not. As far as I can recall, the report was about how the operation was worth every single penny and how these three had risked their lives providing us vital information. I only wish I could remember what the information was, but I can’t. I can’t remember what the total cost was either. I assume it was in the report, but that part’s a complete blank.”

“You wrote the report in early February and you were fired in a matter of weeks.” Jacques was rotating his glass between his palms. Huff was studying his gin. To maintain the mood, I took a glug of Sancerre as if I were Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. I wanted to come off looking knowing and world-weary, but my heart was thumping and I sensed my eyes blinking like a strobe light. I was both afraid of and agog at what Jacques was going to say. “By writing the report, you were complicit with them, or at least with Ben, in a cover-up.”

“But I was totally clueless —”

“That’s how he wanted it. The problem was, when all was said and done, Ben couldn’t be completely sure how much information you’d come across in preparing the report. As you just told us, he made you delete a couple of things. There might have been more he told you to drop.”

“There probably was,” I said. “He would never delete only two things and say fine. And for all I know, he might have rewritten some of it on his own. I doubt it could have been all of it because he was a clunky writer.”

“Do you remember if you talked to or got information from anyone besides Ben and Lisa?” Huff asked.

“I must have. I would have endnoted the names of anyone I dealt with. Ben couldn’t just have me write a report clearing him of any misjudgment or overspending based on his own word and someone as low-level as Lisa. Also, whatever I wrote would have had to go through Archie, the head of our unit.”

“Would it?” Jacques wanted to know. “Don’t you think Mattingly could have found a way to end-run him on the report? Because chances are that’s what he did on the operation itself. I don’t think Archie knew. Ben wasn’t authorized to order or even approve anything like that.”

“It’s possible Archie didn’t know. I’m guessing here. I wasn’t privy to how they ran the unit. But all hell was breaking loose in Eastern Europe then, so maybe our internal controls weren’t functioning the way they were supposed to. Maybe Ben ingratiated himself with someone in Clandestine Services, offered to help. I can’t imagine anyone saying yes, but who knows? Do you think there could be an outside chance he did it on his own?”

“Yes, because I can’t imagine anyone giving him the green light. It’s not because he was Intelligence. It’s that everyone knew his abilities, but they also knew he was something of a dilettante. If you’re mentioned in society columns too often, people suspect you’re not working hard enough. If you’re known to be carrying on all the time with girls young enough to be your daughter—”

“If you started having children early,” I interposed.

“ — then you’re not working hard enough. And if you’re so oblivious to the consequences of fooling around with girls you’re supposed to be supervising, then you don’t have the judgment to be an operative.”

But Ben was so glamorous. I was swept up. Being with him, I felt as if I were a character in the most thrilling espionage story in the world. Strange how it didn’t occur to me that so many of those novels and movies end with the spy’s girlfriend dead on a rainy street and the spy walking off into the night.

“This is what I think happened,” Jacques continued. “Ben was afraid of what you knew, even if you didn’t know you knew it. There was always the chance that when things slowed down, you’d think, Wait. What was that all about? And naturally, he worried that whatever doubts about him you had that might come to the surface, you had a motive for talking. You would have gone to Archie or someone from Security.”

“Ben would think my motive was that I was bitter because he’d dropped me?”

“Yes. So he went to Archie and told him a story about you. Archie bought it.”

“Do you know this as a fact?” I demanded.

“Yes. He signed a statement that you were incompetent. Mattingly claimed that on two occasions you’d told him you had mistakenly shredded documents.”

I went numb. I couldn’t think. I definitely couldn’t move. Alive, but only in a rudimentary way: I could hear the hmmm and gurgle of the air conditioner. Maybe I breathed. “What?” I finally croaked.