Past Perfect (40 page)

“You’ll tell me later.” He pulled down the blanket. “Get some sleep.”

“Is it tomorrow that we have to drive up to camp?”

“The day after. Your parents will drive up separately. Maddy may go with them.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I spoke to her before my plane took off. I asked her to pretend to be you and report your driver’s license and credit cards lost. When we were about to hang up, she said she wanted to see Nicky and would hitch a ride with your parents. Go to sleep, Katie.”

The sheets were probably polyester-blend hotel sheets, nothing fancy, but as I slid under the cover they felt utterly smooth and cool, like the highest-count Egyptian cotton. “How can I explain what I look like?” I could feel myself slipping into sleep, as if I’d taken some fast-acting and marvelous drug. “Nicky will be shocked.”

“I e-mailed him this morning that you’d gone berry picking with a bunch of your friends and that you fell in a raspberry patch and got scratched up. I told him not to be surprised if you look like you went one-on-one with a mountain lion.”

“Don’t let me sleep too long because then I won’t be able to fall asleep tonight.”

I didn’t wake up until the next morning. Thankfully, Adam had remembered to bring my sneakers and socks. And despite my worst fears, he hadn’t packed a silk skirt and black lace camisole to go with the sneakers. Sensible blue pants and a white cotton sweater, an outfit he could understand because it was the female equivalent of what he would wear. And best of all, he handed me my passport. I could go home.

On the flight back to New York, I gave him the “I’ll understand if you hate me for the rest of your life for keeping all this terrible stuff hidden from you” preface before giving him some sense of what I’d discovered. I found myself, though, jumping back and forth from the three Germans to Lisa and Ben to Jacques and Huff. I kept using the names Hans and Bernard and Manfred and Dick interchangeably and confusingly, so Adam had me make a chart on the back of my boarding pass that looked like the dramatis personae listed before a play: “Hans Pfannenschmidt—comm. party liaison to crim. justice, later Bernard Ritter, Minneap. brake fluid sales, stabbed.”

Somewhere, probably over Pennsylvania, I asked him, “Are you angry?”

“I’ve been in your family long enough to say ‘at some level.’ Why couldn’t you come to me right away?”

“I don’t know. Partly because it was more an obsession than a problem to solve. Partly because you made it clear, or at least that’s how I took it, that you had heard enough about it and that I should forget it. Get a life. Maybe I was wrong, but that’s how I read your reaction.”

“That was pretty much it. So I guess I should apologize to you for being, whatever. Insensitive.”

“Okay.”

“I’m sorry,” Adam said.

“Accepted.” I kissed his cheek. “Remember that being insensitive isn’t as big a deal as what I did.”

“I guess not. But don’t start up with that ‘You’re going to hate me for the rest of my life.’ You know I don’t hold grudges.”

I did know. We gave each other that married couple public kiss with puckered-up lips accompanied by a smacking sound. Then he picked up his Harlan Coben novel and I reached into Maria’s shopping bag for the Gourmet I’d bought at the airport, figuring that would take my mind off all that had happened in Tallahassee—unless it was an issue devoted to the art of the cheese sandwich. Except what I touched first was the rubber band around those manila envelopes I’d found in Maria’s trunk. I pulled out the tray from the arm of the seat, put the rubber band around my wrist, and picked up the first one. Clasped but not sealed.

Adam looked over. “What’s that?”

Funny, but my instinct was to get creative. I fought it. “I found them in the trunk of her car.”

“You just took them?” I nodded. He gave me slightly raised eyebrows that I interpreted as “Thou shalt not steal” and went back to his book.

I opened the envelope and found a sheaf of paper that had nothing to do with real estate. All in German. Single-spaced. It looked boring. Most likely typed rather than computer-generated because it had that fuzzy quality from a tired old typewriter ribbon. Maybe she had written her memoirs after all. I didn’t even attempt to translate any of it but quickly leafed through a few more pages. Boring, boring, and then I stopped. Letterhead. It said Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit. Ministry of State Security. The Stasi. In the upper left-hand corner was a small logo, a bare arm holding up a rifle and bayonet, the rifle serving as a pole displaying the East German flag.

“Oh boy!” I said and handed it to Adam, who reluctantly put down his book. “Can you read it?” He had studied German because it was a requirement for his doctorate, and could read 100 percent more than I could, which, while being nothing to be ashamed about, did not qualify him to become a Thomas Mann scholar.

“‘State Ministry—’”

“I know. It’s the Stasi, their secret police force.”

“ ‘The something or other was followed to … a store in the Mitte district. There he meets, met, something Manfred Gottesman.’” Adam took the list I’d drawn up from his book, where he’d put it to mark his page. “That’s one of your guys,” he said.

“I know. Can you see …” I ran my finger slowly down the page until it came to Benton Mattingly.

I felt as if I’d been away for ages instead of just two days, but rather than go home, hug the dogs, and get together the books, cube-in-a-cube brainteaser, and swim goggles I’d bought for Nicky, I dragged Adam to the bank and opened a safe deposit box in both our names. I put all the manila envelopes into it—the ones with all the Stasi files on Ben, including Manfred’s dictated memoranda with his signature at the bottom of each, the party’s own reports, written by Hans, and my personal favorite, the envelope of photographs of Ben and Manfred together. Six of them were taken at the same time, one right after the other. They were seated at a small round table inside a café. From their sequence, it appeared that Manfred was taking a regular white business envelope out of a big, hard-sided briefcase, peering inside it, licking it to seal it, handing it to Ben, Ben holding it between thumb and index finger, staring at it as if it were a small menu, and finally putting it into his inside jacket pocket.

“You know what it is,” I’d said to Adam, “but someone could look at it and say the order was reversed, and that Ben was the one handing over the envelope to Hans.”

My husband, fortunately, was the man who spent a good part of his professional life looking at cells under a microscope and discerning subtle differences among them. “Look,” he said. Above what I guessed was a coffee bar, there were two boxes of cookies, evidence of the scarcity of consumer goods in East Germany, and above that a row of old black-and-white photographs of men boxing. On top of those was a large portrait-style photo of Erich Honecker, the head of the East German government, who had resigned in mid-October 1989. And over that, almost at the top, was about three-quarters of wall clock. The top of it was cut off by the frame of the picture. Adam pointed to it.

“What?” I demanded. “What are you pointing at?”

“Look close,” he said. I squinted, but was still mystified. “The clock has a second hand. The pictures start with Manfred digging in his briefcase. See? The one with Ben putting the envelope into his pocket is three or four seconds later.”

I’d imagined visiting day at camp so often that I didn’t even need a DVD of it: Nicky running with outstretched arms, Nicky showing me a lamp base he’d carved and stained, Nicky sailing a Sunfish, separated only by years from crewing on the boat that would win the 2020 America’s Cup.

Not quite. My DVD did not have footage of grandparents and assorted other relatives waiting behind a line made by two traffic cones and thirty feet of string. My parents, both wearing white, looked ready for an afternoon of croquet or a Ralph Lauren ad. Maddy was in full makeup—lip gloss —and had on black cropped pants, a blue Henley shirt, and a Poets & Writers baseball hat. After kissing me almost everyplace I wasn’t scratched, my mother held my hands a lot, peered into my eyes, checked my scratches one after another without asking me if I was okay; then, as if I were unable to speak for myself, she asked Adam, “Did she get a tetanus shot?”

My father refrained from his usual bear hug, kissed my forehead, and offered to send Adam and me on a cruise of the Greek islands so I could recuperate. When I told him I was fine, he said, “Trust me, whatever you’ve been through, you don’t get fine just like that.”

My sister gave my hand a gentle squeeze, then started crying and hugged me. This triggered my mother, who sobbed embarrassingly loudly. She embraced us both at the same time, no doubt with equal compression. Then she reapplied her eyeliner.

At noon, Lionheart’s campers, fat, medium, and downright trim, were released from their bunks and variously raced, ran, and galumphed to the other side of the string. Nicky? Nicky? At least a quarter of the boys’ hair was sun-bleached, the way Nicky’s got every summer. I didn’t recognize him at first because he looked so much taller then he had just the month before and he’d slimmed down, so now he resembled someone else’s husky football player son. I couldn’t believe he was only ten years old.

No outstretched arms. He sauntered over, allowing us time to admire him and, finally, to hug and kiss him. “Hey,” he said to me as we strolled toward the picnic tables, “why were you picking raspberries?”

“I don’t know. It seemed like a summery, back-to-the-land thing to do.”

“Mom, stick to Fairway from now on,” he advised.

We ate grilled chicken, grilled vegetables, and fruit with lots of flies. We watched Nicky play tennis and shoot a rifle. We admired the stay-fit Web site he was designing, Nicky’s Slim Pickings, and the mahogany-stained mini-cabinet to store his iPod and CDs—with wood pegs to hold earphones. We visited his bunk and gave him his gifts under the watchful eye of a counselor guarding against contraband Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. At parting, back near the parking lot, Adam and I got all choked up. My parents had that beatific our grandson look. My sister’s eyes were glazed with dread at the prospect of the six-hour ride home with my parents, so I took pity on her and invited her to drive with us. Nicky kissed us perfunctorily, said, “See you in three and a half weeks,” and moseyed back to his bunk.

WEEKS EARLIER, WHEN I had spoken with Constance Cincotta, the Washington lawyer who had spent twenty years in the Office of the General Counsel in the CIA, she’d told me there wasn’t anything she could find out about why I’d been fired. Nothing could penetrate the Agency’s wall of silence.

On Monday I spent two hours on the phone with her telling her what had happened. I admitted that I’d gotten some “guidance” from a couple of friends, but I wouldn’t give her Jacques’s or Huff’s names. Not that I didn’t trust in the attorney-client privilege, but I wouldn’t name names.

Then I hit the bank vault and spent the rest of the day in the apartment, scanning all the documents and photographs I got from Maria’s trunk, and e-mailed them to Constance. Then, just because I would have had Jamie do it in a script, I burned a CD of all the data. I hid it in the bottom of the bin where I kept the dogs’ kibble and brought the manila envelopes back to the bank.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, Constance and two of her associates were at work on my case. On Thursday morning I was in her office, handed over to her the manila envelopes, and got many receipts for the papers and photographs. She put them all in her law firm’s safe and together we drove to the Central Intelligence Agency.

Walter McKey, the general counsel of the CIA, was the most distinguished-looking man I’d ever seen. He could have been cast as president, at least in an era before presidents came from the South and pretended to be modest. He had steel gray hair neatly combed back and an exquisitely trimmed steel gray mustache. His voice was deep and so assuring it made me want to salute. Plus he looked me in the eye and said, “I’m sorry.”

My lawyer, Constance Cincotta, had another great voice, full and melodic. “There’s a reason for sorrow. This is a blight on the Agency. Even more, it has been a blight on Ms. Schottland’s life for fifteen years.”

“I understand,” Walter McKey said.

Maybe being a lawyer wasn’t enough. You had to mesmerize. To get hired for the general counsel’s office, you had to outdo Churchill in the vocal department. For a couple of minutes, I’d been so entranced listening to them that I had trouble concentrating on what they were actually saying. Also, just being back at the CIA had shaken me. We were in a small conference room, sitting around an oval table. Walter McKey had held my chair for me, which I’d thought extremely gallant at the moment. It probably was, but I was also directly opposite a giant CIA seal on the opposite wall, and its eagle, looking left, was giving all its attention to McKey.

“What can you do to make it better?” Constance asked him.

I wanted to say, Listen, just get all the bad stuff out of my record and we’ll call it quits. But fair is fair. You can at least tell me what you’re going to do about Ben Mattingly. Can you do anything? But lawyers had to cover all possibilities. It would not have been seemly for me to say, Hey, cut to the chase.

At this moment, they turned to Joanne Sexton, the representative from the Directorate of Intelligence. She’d been notably silent up to this point, although she had said hi when we were introduced and gave me a hearty but not bone-crushing handshake. From her hi, I guessed she couldn’t make a career from her voice alone. As she pronounced the word “Hah” followed by an incandescent smile, I imagined her spending her early years as the happiest cheerleader at Tuscaloosa High School before deciding to become a substantive person and serve her country. “You seem to be settled and successful in your career, your life in New York. Am I mistaken? Are you thinking you might be interested in coming back here?”

“No. I have a good life where I am.”

“Ms. Schottland’s termination, her consequent inability to find another job —all of that cannot be brushed aside,” Constance declared. She gripped the edge of the table and leaned toward Walter McKey. “We would expect some sort of gesture.”