Past Perfect (20 page)

“Just Jock.”

Realizing only then that Harv wasn’t about to vault out of the Jeep to open my door, I got out and said hopefully, “See you later.” Without even a yup or waiting to see if anyone answered the door, he was off.

I shouldn’t have worried about my knuckles getting raw or shrieking Mr. Harlow, Mr. Harlow, are you there? then having my words echo from mountain to mountain, mockingly, until I wept. Seconds after my first knock, the door opened and a man who looked a wretched-life fifty-five or a blessed-by-fortune seventy said, “Good morning.”

“Good morning,” I replied.

He held the big wood door open, and I walked into … well, into a big wood house. I couldn’t shake that cathedral feeling. Not in any St. Patrick’s sense: with its giant gnarled wooden posts and vaulted and beamed ceilings, the place seemed built for the worship of some powerful tree god.

Jacques Harlow himself wasn’t exactly godlike. On the other hand, he wasn’t an eyesore. He had the even-featured, craggy face of a forgotten movie star, but with an older man’s sun-dried skin and loss of lips. His eyes must have started out blue or gray, but now they were faded to that no-color shade that could only be described as pale. Nothing was new about him: after nine thousand launderings, his jeans had shrunk in length but not in size; they were just short of baggy, which admittedly was better than having to eyeball an older guy’s package. His blue shirt, with its button-down, frayed collar, appeared to have been worn on a once-a-week basis since he was eighteen.

“Let’s go into the living room,” he suggested.

As with Merry and Harv’s cabin, the public part of the downstairs was a single great room — living room, kitchen, dining room, den, and a massive alcove with a flat-screen TV so big that if he watched Spy Guys, Dani and Javiero would be taller than they were in real life. The entire downstairs area had approximately the same square footage as Macy’s.

My stomach, which I thought was on the mend, did a nervous flip. I smelled fresh coffee and prayed he wouldn’t offer me any. Even though he wasn’t terribly tall —probably an inch or two under six feet—Jacques Harlow didn’t seem dwarfed by the scale of his house. It could have been the remnants of military bearing, but he had a stature that wasn’t measured in feet or inches. When we got to the living room, he gestured toward a chair that had all but Papa Bear’s name on it. “You can sit there,” he ordered, though not impolitely. If the idea was to make me feel diminished and/or cowed in an oversize piece of furniture, it didn’t work because the tactic seemed so obvious to me. I inched back so I would have something to lean against, but that meant my feet had to leave the floor. So be it. Maybe he was doing a mental eenie-meenie-minie-mo because it took him a little while before he settled into a rocking chair—one of those made out of knotty sticks lashed together with rawhide. It struck me as a little Wyoming for North Carolina. It was catercornered to mine, so he had to turn his head to talk face-to-face.

“So Huff Van Damme is an adviser to your show?” he asked.

“Right. He gave me your name because—”

“Why do you need an adviser?”

“The show’s about two CIA agents,” I said. “Occasionally I’ll need a few words of intelligence jargon so the characters can toss them around, sound more authentic. Like collection management officer or angel assets. Or I’ll need to know what an operative would do in a certain situation.” I was seated facing a stone fireplace so high and wide it looked like an altar. Four logs rested on a grate, all ready for a cold spell that might not come for months.

“How is Huff at advising?” Something in his question amused him. Jacques Harlow seemed like a guy pleased by his own company.

I didn’t want to establish or confirm my status as a blabby female who could be dealt with in the most superficial manner possible, then sent on her way. So I simply said, “As an adviser? Huff does the job.”

He had gone forward in the rocker and for a few seconds, he stayed there waiting for me to go on. When I didn’t, he rocked back and crossed his legs. His shoe, a moccasin aspiring to loaferdom, slipped from the back and dangled from his toes. His heels needed moisturizer. “What do you want to know about East Germany?” he asked.

“I’d be interested to hear a little about your background first.”

“You could have looked it up.”

“Maybe I did. Maybe I’m just asking to get a sense of how you present yourself.”

He rose a bit from the rocker and turned it so that it faced me. “Here, I’m presenting myself.” I guessed this was humor, but he wasn’t the type to signal with anything like a smile. “Born in Chevy Chase. That’s Maryland.”

“I know.”

“Well, you had to ask where Asheville was.”

“True.” The anti-babble stance was hard to maintain because it was so against my nature. I came from a talking family, a blabby city. Still, I’d been taught to trust my gut, and my gut at that moment was telling me to hold back, that the only way to win this guy’s respect was by not having him view me as a lightweight. “So what happened after you were born?”

“University of Maryland. Math major.”

I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t—though he did stop rocking. “Assuming you didn’t graduate last June, what happened between college and now?”

“Army. Military attaché. Eastern Europe. Left in seventy-eight and went into Defense Intelligence. Retired two years ago.”

In some ways talking to Jacques Harlow was like trying to use a machine that needed maintenance: difficult to get anything out of. In other ways, he was uncomfortably human. The question was, human in what respect? Someone who in another era might have taken a vow of silence? Working alone, living alone. The huge house was almost soundless: no creaks despite all that wood, no drone of an air conditioner or refrigerator compressor. His reluctance to talk was not simply a tendency to be reticent, like Adam and his family. Maybe he was holding back as some sort of test. Or maybe he was next to nuts, with a mind so assailed with crazy thoughts that he couldn’t concentrate on the give-and-take of regular communication.

“I’m interested in what was going on in eighty-nine, when East Germany fell apart.”

“Do you want coffee?” he asked.

“No thanks.”

“Still sick to your stomach?”

“A little. Nice of Merry to call to tell you I was indisposed.”

“Tea?”

Knockout drops. Poison. Tea bags that had been around since his differential equations final. “No, but thank you for offering.” He got up and went to the kitchen. His walking did almost nothing to break the silence. I got busy rearranging my purse; what I wanted to do was see if my cell phone was working. It wasn’t. Not a single bar of reception. I was out of touch with the world.

WHEN HE GOT BACK, coffee mug in hand, I said, “How surprised were you when the East German government collapsed so quickly?”

“There was no reason to be surprised. The Soviet Union wasn’t going to intervene militarily, or in any meaningful way, for that matter. East German industry had gone to hell in a handbasket. The people hated the government and the Stasi. Repression, corruption, monumental inefficiency. The only way you could miss the handwriting on the wall was if you never learned to read.”

“Then how come some of the best minds at the CIA were said to be surprised?”

Jacques Harlow’s pale eyes locked on mine. “ ‘Were said to be surprised?’ You were there. Don’t you have any idea of how surprised they were?”

Talking about surprised, I don’t know why I was. Of course Huff would have told him I’d been with the Agency.

“I was pretty low on the food chain.”

“I gather your job entailed writing reports that went to the oversight committees.” I nodded. “Good. Then why don’t you cut the crap. You’re not here about your television show. What is it you want?”

If there had been some ambient noise, as least I could have averted my head to one side—Listen! Is that a ruby-throated hummingbird?—and had a couple of seconds to come up with something. But there was only silence.

There had been moments on the flight to Asheville when I’d asked myself why I was doing this. Why had I dissed my husband and pissed off my producer to go to North Carolina? Yes, it was the sort of thing characters do on TV shows (with stock footage of a Delta plane, then an interior scene, shot close in so as not to show how low the budget was). I’d gone for movement. Action. Something happened so that something else could happen. But what could Jacques Harlow possibly tell me?

What I needed was a link to Lisa Golding, who might at that very moment be very, very dead. I felt a chill of fear, then argued with myself that she could be sunning herself on the Costa de la Luz having totally forgotten me. I had deduced or maybe induced—having always gotten them mixed up—that when Lisa called, what she’d wanted from me had something to do with the report I’d written on the three Germans. Yet I had no notion whether this conclusion represented clear thinking on my part or the mushy mentality of someone who earned a living by making up improbable stories and who was desperately looking for answers.

But, assuming any supposition was correct, where had all that thinking gotten me? Scared. Here I was, in a humongous and extremely remote house in the company of an ex-Defense Intelligence guy who at worst had slit a few throats in his day and at best wouldn’t talk about anything that might be classified. Maybe he’d insisted I come down here because he’d decided that after two years of retirement, it was time to talk to someone, but he now regretted it and couldn’t wait to get rid of me. But how would he get rid of me? By being obnoxious and condescending? Or by other means? I had a fast, cinematic vision of me running through the woods trying to get away from his maniacal pale eyes and suddenly not only was I being chased (rather breathlessly) by Jacques Harlow, but also by Merry of the questionable taste in Tshirts and husband, Harv, both of whom were in splendid shape and carried rifles.

“I got fired in 1990,” I said.

“I know.”

“I’m here because I want to know why.”

He looked at me as if I had just started speaking a language he’d never heard before. “You don’t know why?”

“No. I haven’t a clue. I’ve tried to find out and struck out. So you’re sort of a last straw. Huff says you know what was going on in Germany in eighty-nine and ninety. Maybe something you can tell me can lead me to the truth about what happened to me. I need to know.”

“What’s so important about knowing?”

“Because …” I reminded myself of Nicky when he’d been seven or eight and kept saying “because …” when he didn’t want to tell the truth but, whether out of fear or honor, didn’t want to lie. “… it’s been eating away at me all these years. The injustice of it.”

I didn’t think he could sit any straighter, but he did. “How old are you?

“Forty in December.”

“So you’re thirty-nine years old and you’re upset that in 1990 the CIA treated you unjustly?” He got that smirky half smile Europeans in Hollywood movies get when confronted by the naivete of Americans.

“Yes.” That was it for my being a woman of few words trying to gain his respect. “Listen,” I snapped, and then picked up speed, “even though I’ve only been in this house for a little while, I could probably come up with something about you that would make me go …” I imitated his smirk. “I have no idea why you insisted I come down here, but whatever your agenda is, I didn’t come to be condescended to. Most people have one or two things in their lives that still anger or disturb them five, ten, forty years later. And someone else can say, Isn’t that ridiculous, your letting something like that bother you. Get over it! But you and I are both old enough to know that what’s ridiculous to someone else isn’t the least bit foolish to us.”

He answered with a long, deep breath that puffed out his chest, the way birds do before mating to appear more impressive and resplendent. This was not exactly a satisfactory response. But since I had nothing more to say, I waited. He exhaled and said, “At the risk of being ungentlemanly … maybe your distress has something to do with your being about to turn forty.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he replied.

“I don’t know either. Look, even if I have all the predictable miseries about going into my forties —that menopause is coming and I’m going to shrivel up and look like a Greek olive or that my husband will leave me for a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader —I don’t see what that has to do with my wanting to know why I was shafted by the CIA.”

Jacques Harlow rubbed his palms on his jeans as if they’d been sweating. Maybe he’d been a warfare planner, maybe an operative who’d had to perform some extremely dirty tricks, but he didn’t seem to be a man who easily discussed emotional issues. He was obviously relieved that the turning-forty business was over, but he made one more stab at psychology. “Did you get into writing your TV show because you thought espionage was marketable? Or because you’d been at the Agency?”

“Maybe a little of each. But I first wrote the novel the show is based on. That was because I loved the spy genre. Once I got to sixth grade, I was reading spy fiction. When I got a little older, I started going to spy movies. I remember once being the only person in the theater watching a Japanese antiwar spy film with subtitles that seemed to have been lifted from some other movie.” He sucked in a cheek so his mouth shifted to the left. “Are you trying to think of some diplomatic way to tell me something undiplomatic?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Well, go ahead.”

He nodded a thank-you. “You want to right a past wrong. Has it occurred to you that your going back to the past is a means of reconnecting with the Agency, of giving yourself an adventure? So your life can resemble one of your television shows?”

Not bad. I wished I had the rocking chair, because I could have gone back and forth on that one for a while. I wasn’t my mother’s daughter for nothing. I just sat quietly, though. Finally I said, “It’s a thoughtful question. I wish I could give you a definitive ‘Absolutely not!’ But I don’t know. I don’t think I want actual adventure. If I did, I would have applied to the clandestine service when I applied to the CIA. But if I had, I’m sure I couldn’t have passed the psychological tests, because I don’t have what it takes. I don’t get thrills from danger, I just get scared. Look, Mr. Harlow, I’ve never even been on a roller-coaster.” I was about to say the only way I’d ever get on one would be at gunpoint, but I decided to skip it.