Past Perfect by Susan Isaacs

Author:Susan Isaacs [Susan Isaacs]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781453219706
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Published: 2011-04-10T14:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-one

LESS THAN TWELVE HOURS to North Carolina and back again, yet as I waited in the taxi line at LaGuardia, I didn’t feel I was home. It wasn’t one of those Ooh, Dwayne, look at the tall buildings! reactions. I wasn’t under enchantment from the green beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Sure, as far as mountains went, they were beautiful enough. But the universe I’d moved into didn’t have tourist attractions. It did have Jacques Harlow, however. I couldn’t get him out of my head.

I was like a character in one of Nicky’s fantasy novels; unknowingly, I had tripped through a rip in the fabric of time-space somewhere between Asheville and New York. I was now in a world remarkably like the one I’d left, except instead of normal concerns like global warming, whether to drive or take the subway to Yankee Stadium, and checking out newspaper advice on selecting a good honeydew, this entire universe was about intelligence. Not the intelligence establishment of Spy Guys. Nothing bubbly here. Just information and analysis, loyalty and perfidy and more dagger than cloak—Jacques’s world, or maybe my cockeyed vision of the world that he inhabited.

My alternate world was right next to this one, but I couldn’t quite make it back. It wasn’t that Adam’s greeting was chilly and uninviting. He’d never been particularly adept as a grudge-holder. While he was still upset that I’d gone away without him, we had polite sushi in front of the TV. We switched between the baseball game and Seems Like Old Times, which we agreed made us miss Nicky and his seal-bark laugh as he watched movies with us. Yet all the while, I couldn’t get the three Germans out of my head. I kept recalling the photo Lisa had showed me of Manfred Gottesman before she made him over into Dick Schroeder. I imagined him in a cheesy, pants-too-short communist suit, flying out of whatever country the Agency had stashed him in for safekeeping until all his paperwork was final and he could enter the United States. Not satisfying, so I pictured him flying into Dulles, then changed it to some obscure military airport. Wait: a landing field in West Virginia. He was alone on the plane; he was with a CIA handler; he was seated beside German number two and across the aisle from three.

Between the movie and the Yankees winning, Adam was in a good enough mood that a black nightgown and half an hour would have patched things up. But I was too preoccupied. All I could have possibly responded to was friction, and with Jacques’s “Huff told me he heard you might have gotten a raw deal” echoing in my head, even that was questionable. So I went for yellow gingham, murmured, “God, I’m so exhausted,” and stood on tippytoes to peck him on the cheek—a posture as close to cute as I ever got—before we got into bed.

He took the next day off, and we drove out early to spend the weekend at my parents’ place in East Hampton.

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