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  PAST PERFECT

  Susan Isaacs

  To Mary Rooney.

  In 1977, when I had doubts, she said,

  “Of course you can write a novel.”

  This book is for her, with love and thanks.

  CONTENTS

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  A Biography of Susan Isaacs

  Chapter One

  OH GOD, I WISH I had a weapon! Naturally, I don’t. Of course, if life in any way resembled Spy Guys, the espionage TV show I write, I’d pull off the top of my pen and with one stab inflict a fatal wound, and save my life. Except no pen: just two pieces of chewed Dentyne Ice spearmint wrapped in a receipt for sunscreen and panty liners.

  When I began making notes on what I naively thought of as Katie’s Big Adventure, I hadn’t a clue that my life would be on the line. How could I? This would be my story, and every ending I’d ever written had been upbeat. But in the past few weeks I’ve learned that “happily ever after” is simply proof of my lifelong preference for fantasy over reality.

  Unfortunately, fantasy will not get me out of this mess. So what am I supposed to do now? First, calm down. Hard to do when I’m crouched behind a toolshed, up to my waist in insanely lush flora that’s no doubt crawling with fauna.

  It’s so dark. No moon, no stars: the earth could be the only celestial object in a black universe. And it’s hot. Even at this late hour, there is no relief from the heat. My shirt is sweat-drenched and so sucked against my skin it’s a yellow-and-white-striped epidermis.

  I cannot let myself dwell on the fact that my danger is doubled because I’m so out of my element. Me, Total Manhattan Sushi Woman, cowering behind a toolshed in fried pork rinds country with unspeakable creatures from the insect and worm worlds who think my sandaled feet are some new interstate.

  Adam, my husband, would probably be able to identify the nocturnal bird in a nearby tree that refuses to shut up, the one whose hoarse squawks sound like “Shit! Shit! Shit!” Adam is a vet. A veterinary pathologist at the Bronx Zoo, to be precise. Were something that feels like a rat’s tail to brush his toes in the dark, he wouldn’t want to shriek in horror and vomit simultaneously, like I do. He’d just say, Hmm, a Norway rat. Adam is close to fearless.

  I, of course, am not. If I concentrate on what’s happening here in the blackness, the slide of something furry against my anklebone, the sponginess of the ground beneath the thin, soaked soles of my sandals, a sudden Bump! against my cheek, then something, whatever it is (bat? blood-swollen insect?) ricocheting off, I will literally go mad, and trust me, I know the difference between literally and figuratively. I’ll howl like a lunatic until brought back to sanity by the terrible realization that I’ve given away my precise location to that nut job who is out there, maybe only a hundred feet away, stalking me.

  Feh! Something just landed on the inner part of my thigh. As I brush it off, its gross little feet try to grip me.

  Don’t scream! Calm down. Taoist breathing method: Listen to your breathing. Easy. Don’t force it. Just concentrate. Listen. All right: three reasonably calm breaths. What am I going to do? How am I going to survive? Will I ever see Adam again? And our son, Nicky?

  What used to be my real life back in New York seems as far away as some Blondie concert I went to when I was fifteen. All right, what the hell was I originally thinking I had to do here behind the toolshed? Oh, try to remember what I wrote in the journal I began a day or two after that first disturbing phone call. Maybe something I’d unthinkingly jotted down could help me now, or could at least allow me to delude myself that this episode will be yet another of my ... and they lived happily ever after.

  Chapter Two

  AS THE VOICE-OVER intro to spy guys observes every three or four episodes when some new hell breaks loose: It all started so simply. And only four weeks ago. It was around two in the afternoon. I was home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan packing a few of my things into a small duffel, preparing to take Nicky, my ten-year-old, to a weight-loss camp in Maine. His trunk was already up there, filled with large-bellied shorts and new athletic gear. Camp Lionheart required a parent to remain nearby for the first twenty-four hours of a camper’s stay, probably to soothe any kid unhinged by half a day of sugar deprivation.

  That kid would not be Nicky. Mere empty carbs were not his downfall. Food was. Naturally there was Ben & Jerry’s. But there was also grapefruit. Calf’s liver with sautéed onions. Giant Caesar salads with bony anchovies no one else under twenty-one would eat. He loved each block of the food pyramid equally. Nicky was a kid of huge enthusiasms. Yankees, Knicks, Giants, Rangers. Megalosaurus, triceratops, pteranodons. Yet, even as the Megalosauruses gave way to Game Boys and Game Boys were eclipsed by His Dark Materials, there was always that one overarching passion, food. Walking him to school when he was little, I had to allow an extra twenty minutes for him to stop and read (aloud and lovingly) every menu posted in the windows of the local restaurants, lifting him so he could read the appetizers. “Gambas al Ajillo,” he’d sound out. “What’s that, Mommy?”

  Sitting on the edge of the bed beside my duffel bag, I glanced inside. I’d folded the sleeves of my pink and aqua tattersall shirt across the front. They looked like hands pressing against a heart. The shirt was crying out to me: What kind of mother are you? How could you do this to your child? Not that Nicky would be one of the weepers, no Mommy, Mommy, don’t leave me here!! Not one of the whiners either. While his father was a Wyoming strong, silent type, Nicky was a blabby New York kid. Still, he had inherited Adam’s tough-it-out gene.

  So there I was, beating up on myself, trying to figure what deranged thought process had led me to convince myself and then argue with Adam that a fat-boy camp was a stellar idea. I was packing off my only kid, giving him an entire summer to reflect on the fact that his mother couldn’t accept him as he was. And his father too, since Adam and I were Present a United Front parents, a concept we’d both gotten from our own families, the eastern Schottlands and the western Graingers. Not that we’d ever consciously decided on such a strategy. Like so much in marriage, we did as our parents did, not necessarily because they were right, but because what they did was what we knew. Since we two were speaking as one, Adam could not blare out the truth: I can’t believe your mother is so shallow and easily gulled by those hysterical “Danger: Childhood Obesity!” reports in the Times and on CNN. My eyes filled, though I can’t remember whether it was at the unfairness of Adam’s unspoken criticism or because it was so close to the mark.

  I actually started crying genuine stream-down-the-cheeks tears when I remembered that Adam wouldn’t be driving up to camp with us. It felt like desertion. It wasn’t. He had to deal with an outbreak of duck plague. Five Muscovy ducks had dropped dead, admittedly not a big deal, unless you’re one of those “there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” types, which obviously they w
ere in the zoo’s pathology department. Truthfully, my tears weren’t flowing because I couldn’t bear to be without my husband’s company. After fifteen years of marriage, most people can tolerate forty-eight spouse-free hours. But I wanted Adam along to witness for himself, once again, my devotion to Nicky, to observe what a splendid mother I was, and how leaving our son in a weight-loss camp was not the act of a neurotic New Yorker who had a block of ice for a heart.

  At that instant, my phone rang. I picked it up and uttered a tremulous “Hello.”

  “Hey, Katie Schottland,” said a squeaky, cartoon voice, as if the speaker had come from some primary-colored, two-dimensional universe whose inhabitants did not have genitalia. “Do you know who this is?”

  I sniffled back about a quart of as-yet unshed tears, then wiped my eyes with the three-quarter sleeve of my new, cantaloupe-colored stretch T-shirt that gave my skin the golden glow of liver disease. Shaken as much by my weepiness as by the intrusion of the call, I stood, marched to the dresser, and, holding the portable phone between ear and shoulder, yanked open a drawer. I wished I were one of those tough dames who could bellow, I don’t have time for this shit! What I actually said was: “If you don’t tell me who this is, I’m hanging up.”

  It’s not in my nature to be that snippy, but I’d gotten home late from the studio in Queens where we taped Spy Guys for QTV, a network that called itself “The People’s Choice for Quality Cable.” (Its detractors called it Quantity Cable.) Besides being rushed and sick with guilt about what I was doing to Nicky, I was again trying to dig up the old dark blue bandanna I’d been searching for obsessively, as though it were a talisman that would protect both me and my son from my folly. Why couldn’t I find it? I pictured myself wearing it knotted casually around my neck, the implication being that I’d be using it as a sweatband, or, in a pinch, as a tourniquet as I gave first aid to a fellow hiker who’d suffered a hundred-foot fall from a precipice. Not that I was actually considering the Parent-Child Hike option scheduled for Camp Lionheart’s opening day, but for my son’s sake, I needed to look like a gung-ho mother who delights in vigorous exercise.

  Meanwhile, the person on the phone shrilled, “Come on, Katie. Lighten up.” Now I could hear: definitely a woman’s voice. Not unfamiliar. Her identity was right on the tip of some neuron, although she was not sister, close friend, mother, or anyone connected with the show. Still, I couldn’t access the name.

  “Fine,” I said, “I’m lightened up. Now please tell me.”

  “Actually, this is serious. Terribly, terribly serious.”

  “Lisa!” I exclaimed.

  For all the time I’d known Lisa Golding, since our sunny days more than fifteen years ago in the CIA, she’d had a habit of repeating adjectives: “The German translator has a gigantic, gigantic pimple on his chin.” “Ben Mattingly’s wife is so filthy, filthy rich that he actually doesn’t find her embarrassing.”

  Anyway, back on that afternoon four weeks ago, Lisa Golding declared, “Katie, I’ve got to talk with you. This is a matter of national importance!”

  National importance? Years earlier, when we were both in our twenties, Lisa’s job at the CIA had been an extension of her brief career as an assistant set designer at a regional theater in exurban Atlanta. She set up houses and wardrobes, and coached foreign nationals in American lifestyles. She worked for the International Cooperation Detail, the CIA’s equivalent of a witness protection program. The ICD brought people whom our government owed big-time to the United States to live.

  “Do you know why I’m calling you?” she demanded.

  “You just said something about a matter of national importance,” I muttered, at last finding the blue bandanna. I crumpled and twisted it until it looked wrinkled enough to pass for hiking gear. I know I should have been paying more attention. Yet even though I hadn’t heard from Lisa in years, I couldn’t imagine her saying anything compelling enough to make me slow down my packing. I just assumed her call had to do with my writing Spy Guys: She was coming to New York and could she visit the set; or a friend had written a screenplay and did I know an agent.

  Perhaps at this point I ought to put my conversation with Lisa Golding on hold and explain the spying business. First and foremost, I was never a spy.

  My career path actually began years before I even heard of the CIA, when my big sister, Madeline, copped both the Deering School’s fifth grade’s Vance Poetry Prize and the Kaplan-Klein Essay Award. Uh-oh. At that moment I thought, Okay, I’ll be a theoretical physicist—probably because “mathematician” sounded too pedestrian. That vocabulary does sound a bit much for an eight-year-old, but consider the extenuating circumstances.

  Maddy and I were privileged mini-Manhattanites who lived in a co-op on the Upper East Side with gifted, solvent, and articulate parents. Our father was the founder and CEO of Total Kitchen, a small but quite profitable chain of kitchenware stores for people eager to spend nine hundred dollars on an espresso machine. His hobbies were listening to jazz, mostly that stuff that repeats the same phrase fourteen times — until you can’t bear it anymore — and collecting colonial American cooking equipment. Our kitchen was decorated with shelves and shelves of ugly black iron shit with wood handles.

  Our mother was a psychiatrist whose patients —chichi bulimics and natty manic-depressives —worked mostly in the garment business. She herself had such a brilliant sense of style that more than a few patients confessed they couldn’t bear to quit treatment because they would miss seeing how she got herself up each week. My parents’ friends were an urbane crew, journalists, theatrical producers, an academic here, a lawyer there, as well as their fellow minor moguls and shrinks. Thus, Maddy and I were not at all fazed by words like soigné and Turk’s head mold and astrophysicist. While we were allowed only one hour a day of TV time, our reading was never censored or limited. My vocabulary grew. I read every book that caught my attention, from Harriet the Spy to Wild, Reckless Love to The Big Bang: A Report from the Cosmos.

  Leap forward a decade. Ten years after I enchanted the guests at one of my parents’ dinner parties by appearing in a pink flannel nightgown with itsy-bitsy unicorns prancing on the collar and cuffs and declaring how cool Einstein’s relativity theory was, I recognized an obstacle in my way of becoming a physicist. One ought to like physics. Or at least have a talent for it.

  Ergo, I majored in economics. What with the obligatory differential calculus and statistics, it was a subject comfortably distant from my sister’s world of exquisite literature. Still, during my four years at Connecticut College, my true major was doomed relationships. I also educated my left hand to give my right a flawless manicure, and continued my life of intrigue going to spy movies and reading espionage novels. I read and reread the oeuvres of John Le Carré, Ian Fleming, Robert Littell, and, when in a rare philosophical humor, Graham Greene.

  Upon graduation I was unable to find work reading spy fiction. I came back to New York to spend eighteen hideous months at Winters & McVickers, Investment Bankers. I worked eighteen-hour days among people who found discussions of the availability of government-enhanced equity for investment in venture capital more stimulating than either sex or going to Miami. I figured that was the price I had to pay for being an adult. (My sister, Maddy, by this time, had already had several poems published in Pleiades, one in The New Yorker, and had just gotten married to Dixon Cramer, man about town, gourmet, and a film critic for Variety.) All the above is the simplest explanation for how, shortly before my twenty-third birthday, I turned my back on family and the financiers of New York and ran into the open arms of the spooks of Langley, Virginia.

  Even though the CIA had given me a fair idea of what sort of work I’d be doing, I was a little disappointed that when I arrived at Langley there was no Surprise! You’re going to be a secret agent! welcome. I was placed in the unemotional, spreadsheeted world of financial analysis. But at least I was investigating money laundering. And I was at the CIA! The stuff that dreams were made of, o
r at least my dreams. They gave me a security clearance and an identity card to prove it. I’d never been happier. Every morning as I passed through the security checkpoints, I felt the thrill of being precisely where I was born to be.

  Born to be slightly bored, I decided after a few weeks. But only slightly. There was zero James Bond glamour in my work. Most of it entailed reading communiqués from our own people, reports from other agencies, and analyzing illegally obtained financial data on the assets of certain world leaders and their associates. I was figuring out stuff like how much of, say, our thirty-five million in military aid to a certain country in Central America wound up in el presidente’s offshore account in a bank on the isle of Jersey. (Ans: $7,608,300.) Then I’d write up my findings in snappy, don’t-fall-asleep language for reports to be read by congressional and executive branch staffers.

  So snappy was I that my writing soon got me out of the Economic Study Group. Six months at the CIA and I got transferred to a completely different area. My new gig was working for the deputy chief of the Office of Eastern Europe Analysis, a congenial unit save for the über-chief, a nasty Kentuckian who had let his hair grow out with the Beatles and still, all those years later, sported giant gray sideburns and low-hanging bangs the color of aluminum foil. Nothing boring in this department. Every day I came to work feeling alive: something exciting will happen today. And usually something did. I walked through the halls with that confident, chin-up stride of an astronaut.

  The nearly two years I worked for the Agency might have been a mere blip on the radar screen of anyone else’s life. But this was my bliss. Twenty-three months of knowing not just that I loved what I was doing, but that my work mattered. To me. To my country. Nothing else I’d done or would ever do would feel so right. Then suddenly it was over. And I had no place to go. I couldn’t find another job.

  A prospective employer would call the Agency’s personnel department and all he would get was a terse confirmation that, yes, Katherine Schottland had once been an employee. Had I left of my own accord or been fired? Was I competent? Stable? A patriot? A traitor? No comment. This went on for nearly five years, until Nicky was born; his birth gave me a sweet though colicky excuse to stop looking for work.