An Imperfect Spy (5 page)

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you want to prove that?”

“To demonstrate that I’m invisible, of course. That’s the whole point, you see. As an oldish woman, I’m invisible and can go anywhere, like someone in a fairy story.”

“Ah,” Reed said. “So tonight you became invisible and melted through the door like ghosts in movies. You’re not a ghost, are you?”

“Almost. This time I didn’t play on invisibility, but on conventionality. I simultaneously convinced your doorman that I was harmless, in need of rest, and your aunt.” This last was directed at Reed.

“You aren’t old enough to be my aunt,” Reed said inconsequentially. Kate had already noted after one meeting that one tended to be inconsequential when conversing with this woman.

“Ours was a large family of which I was the youngest, your father the oldest. I didn’t, as I explained to him, get to New York often, and perhaps you hadn’t got the message I left on your machine about my altered time of arrival. I was also feeling faint.”

“My father?” Reed asked.

“Well, I said my name was Amhearst, so it had to be your father. I shan’t presume upon the relationship; please don’t be concerned. I just wanted to demonstrate my thesis and my ability. I was counting, of course, on the fact that you were unlikely to have discussed your extended family with the doorman. That took a certain amount of perspicacity also; give me credit.”

Reed pulled himself together. “Do come in,” he said. “But please, don’t do that to me again. It won’t be a trick, for one thing, now that the doorman considers you my aunt.”

“Point taken,” the woman said.

They moved into the living room, where Kate offered the woman a drink. She chose a single-malt scotch, in which they joined her, and settled herself into a chair.

“I had another reason for wanting to see you,” the woman said, “apart from proving my skills. This is really excellent whisky,” she added, gently smacking her lips as she had done after her sip of Kate’s drink at the Theban. “I thought the time had come to admit to you that I wasn’t altogether honest about my position at Schuyler.”

Reed and Kate continued to regard her steadily, as though she might vanish if not held constantly in their gaze.

“I have the job illegally. That is, I can do what I told them I can do, and I do it very well, but I’m not who they think I am. I borrowed the credentials from someone else, Social Security number, résumé, the lot. She’s retreated to Nova Scotia and couldn’t
care less. If they find out, I’ll say I stole everything. If they don’t—and I shall take jolly good care that they won’t—she’ll have a bit more Social Security than she might otherwise have had. Her name’s Harriet Furst, and that’s the name I use. Please call me Harriet.”

“But you do run the secretarial room at Schuyler Law School?” Kate spoke as one peering through a fog.

“Oh, dear, yes, and very well, too, if I may say so. If you have a little more of that excellent whisky, and don’t mind staying up awhile, I’ll tell you the truth about myself. Not all the truth, but as much as I dare, and I dare the more as I grow older. Montaigne.”

Reed poured her more single-malt scotch, and sat back as though, like the wedding guest, he had been stopped and mesmerized by the Ancient Mariner.

Harriet sipped her drink appreciatively. “Have you ever seen a catalpa tree drop its leaves?” she asked.

Kate shook her head, while Reed continued in his mesmerized state. “I don’t even think I’ve seen a catalpa tree
with
its leaves,” Kate added, for something to say. The question was unusual, but then, everything about Harriet was unusual.

“They drop them all at once—
boom
, like that—while you’re watching. People have often talked about seeing the last leaf fall from a tree, but that’s nothing, believe me, to the sight of a catalpa tree deciding winter has come.

“Well, that’s how it was with me.
Boom
. All the
leaves fell off, and so instead of bowing out gracefully and slowly, as one is supposed to do, I just decided to disappear. Like the catalpa leaves—all at once. No backward glances, no regrets, and no chance to hear from anyone. It was John le Carré who gave me the idea. One simply decides to become a spy. We’re all spies, of course, but some more than others.

“By the way,” she said to Kate, “I know more about you than I let on at the Theban. I know you smoke—at least from time to time, though you’re trying to give it up—which is good news, because so do I. Do you mind if I smoke now; would you like one?” she said to Kate. Kate shook her head. “Too bad,” Harriet said. “I’m at the age where pleasure counts for more than safety; I’m only interested in a few more intense years anyway. I heard you also drink, imbibe caffeine, and consider animal fat essential to human endurance. That’s why I decided I’d be glad to meet you, even though I’d decided I’d have to meet you even if I wasn’t glad; but I’m glad I was glad.”

Kate nodded. She thought of saying “I’m glad, too,” and then decided she wasn’t sure she was.

“I’ve disappeared,” Harriet continued. “Vanished, unable to be found, gone. Registered as a missing person, but not likely to make it off the back list. I figured if le Carré’s characters could just disappear, melt into the scene, remain unnoticed, so could I. Did you read
The Russia House
? The Smiley books are the best, but once Alec Guinness played Smiley, he didn’t seem to belong to le Carré anymore. Understandable,
of course. In le Carré’s books chaps just disappear, sometimes twice. I decided to disappear, too. I’m a big le Carré fan; I know he’s a lost cause when it comes to women, but at least he’s not Norman Mailer. Anyway, I decided to become a spy. Oh, not for government; crooks and bastards, the lot of them. But a modern spy. And I decided to spy at the Schuyler Law School.”

“Why did you decide to be a spy at all?” Kate asked.

“Because I thought I’d be damn good at it. There’s nothing like an old woman to bypass anyone, even doormen standing right in front of those signs that say ‘All visitors must be announced.’ You have a well-run building, so I had to pretend to be an aunt. Usually, they just assume I live there, since plenty of old women live there or visit regularly, and we all look alike. It works like a charm. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it years ago.”

“What did you do before you disappeared?” Kate asked. “Before all the leaves fell off simultaneously?” Reed seemed distinctly stunned, and Kate felt it incumbent upon her to keep up the conversation. Besides, she found to her surprise that she really wanted to know.

“I was a professor, of course. What else? In a university outside Boston, even beyond Cambridge. I had a house like everybody else, with a dog, and a yard with plenty of space for a garden. I rather thought I’d take up gardening one day, when I had the time. Sheer rot, of course. Like all those people who tell you they want time to read all the books
they’ve never got to. If they had wanted to read, they would have read. And I would have gardened. One day I realized that I would never plant a flower, not so much as a bulb, and that I would never go back to my office again and listen to all those second-rate men and women without enough guts to face up to a belligerent mouse. So I just took off for London over the Christmas holidays, having sold my house to a friend who had always admired it but couldn’t afford its real worth and who was willing to take on the dog into the bargain, came back, and just disappeared. I assumed that they would assume that I wouldn’t have sold my house if I wasn’t planning to die, and such plans could easily be understood in the light of my cantankerous nature, which had recently become more so. I vanished, presumed dead, though not legally, of course. But legally doesn’t mean a thing to me.”

“But—” Kate said, and stopped.

“I know all the questions,” Harriet said, “so why don’t I answer the ones I can think of, and that will leave you fewer to ponder. But don’t hold back. Ask what you want, when you want. Just don’t tell anyone you know me, have met me, or have heard a single thing about me, not so much as a whisper. Agreed?”

Kate nodded. This new mode of listening to someone who talked more than she did and did not expect her to talk at all was, she found, refreshing and remarkably little effort. Reed, nudged by Kate, nodded, too.

“I had already cashed in my pension; fortunately,
my university lets you do that after sixty. My husband had a pension, and I had persuaded him to take bigger benefits for his lifetime, not survivor benefits. He died five years ago, and managed to enjoy his retirement without ever stooping to gardening or reading Tolstoy or anything he regretted not having read before. Actually, he became enthralled with computers, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with this story. If there’s a computer heaven, he’s in it. I turned the money I got for my house into cash, and decided, since I had disappeared and wanted to be presumed dead, that I would move into the cash economy, which is bigger than any of us who get paid by salary checks have ever supposed. It’s not all that hard. I get paid by check at the Schuyler, of course, and I cash it at the bank where I’ve opened an account with my nice phony identification, but apart from my Schuyler check I live strictly on a cash basis. I rent a room for cash, I pay cash for everything. I’m an underground spy in America, taking all my cues from le Carré. Fun. And,” she added, “as I said, Harriet is a new name for a new incarnation, so don’t waste your time going through academic catalogs.”

“Why did you want to meet me because I was going to teach at Schuyler Law School?” Kate asked.

“You know, it does show that things do sometimes change under pressure,” Harriet said. “There’s been so much flak at dear old Schuyler Law about anti-woman and -minority attitudes that they’ve agreed to have a course in women in literature and
the law, to be taught by a law professor and someone from outside the law, who will, it is to be hoped, lead the discussion off into byways concerning Jane Eyre, the wills in
Wuthering Heights
, and the trials of Orestes and Billy Budd. Yes, my dear. I know, I haven’t answered your question about the Theban. I had to appear to meet you accidentally; surely you see that.”

“No,” Kate said. “I don’t. Why did you have to meet me accidentally?”

“Well, you had to have met me before I broke into your apartment; you recognized me, don’t you see? I had to talk to you, but I had to do it privately, and I had to establish myself so that you would talk to me privately. As you are. I don’t blame you for feeling you met a pussycat who turned into a tiger,” Harriet said. “I feel the same myself.”

Reed had decided that the moment for him to enter this conversation, if it could be called a conversation, had arrived. “What I don’t understand,” he said, “and I don’t think Kate does either, is why you had to see her, privately or otherwise. True, you will both be working at the Schuyler Law School, as will I. But if you wanted to make our acquaintance, surely there were less dramatic ways to do it.”

Harriet stared at her empty glass, twirling it around. “Do you remember,” she asked, “that woman faculty member from Schuyler Law, just recently tenured, who died subsequently as the result of falling beneath a truck?”

“Vaguely,” Reed said. It was now Kate’s turn to disappear into a profound silence. “I have only the
faintest memory of the woman’s death. In fact, it wouldn’t have received much attention in this violent city if they hadn’t decided at Schuyler Law to mock her by publishing a parody of her ideas after her death.”

“Disaster hardly grabs our attention in this city, dearly as I love it,” Harriet said. “The point is, did she fall or was she pushed? Under the truck, I mean. The police found no evidence of her being pushed, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t. Doesn’t it strike either of you as odd that the first woman faculty they hired met a violent death? Is that too difficult a question? It’s the sort of thing I wanted to discuss privately with you two.” She looked at Reed.

“It’s certainly too difficult a question for tonight,” he said. “I’ve clean run out of energy. We’ll reconvene soon, I promise.”

“All right then,” Harriet said, regarding with a certain plaintiveness her empty glass. “If you say so.” She rose to her feet, putting the glass down. “You’re angry about my getting in here. That was showing off; I apologize. But please try to trust me. Do you know what Smiley said to the students at Sarratt when they asked him how to recognize a lie? He said: ‘Oh, there’s
some
art to faulting the liar, of course there is. But the real art lies in recognizing the truth, which is a great deal harder.’ ” This time she looked at Kate, who shook her head to indicate that Smiley’s words were new to her.

“Well,” Reed said, “if you two are going to exchange quotations, I’m off to bed. I really do think
we’ve carried on long enough for one evening, don’t you?”

“Right you are,” Harriet said. “I’m going, and if I come again, it will be because I’m invited and announced nicely by the watchdog downstairs.”

And with that they saw her to the door.

Three