An Imperfect Spy (2 page)

The flight attendant had approached them and
said that it was the last call for drinks. Would they like some brandy, something like that, some after-dinner drink? He ordered a Courvoisier; she said she would have an aquavit if they had one. She smiled at the attendant. “I took up aquavit in Sweden,” she said to him. “Probably you don’t carry any aquavit on this flight.” But they did. And he found himself, actually found himself, asking to have one, too, instead of his brandy. He had by this time noticed that she wore sneakers, or running shoes, or something inappropriately athletic, and reacted even more unfavorably to that. Yet he ordered her drink. He had no idea why. Except, he had to admit, that he, too, had learned to like aquavit in Scandinavia some years ago. He told her this.

She smiled pleasantly, quickly, but did not answer.

“Are you a professor?” he heard himself asking. She looked like a professor. Damn it, she looked like you had sent to Central Casting for a woman professor: probably no sense of humor, no sense of proportion, didn’t know how to play the game. He knew the type; they turned up in medical school and psychoanalytic institutes, too, more’s the pity.

“Yes,” she said. She was not encouraging him. She did not ask him what he was. She didn’t want to know.

“I’m a doctor,” he heard himself say, not qualifying the kind.

“I see,” she said. And she smiled. She had a rather nice smile, he would give her that. For an old, out-of-shape dame. And he was suddenly embarrassed.
She looked full at him as she said “I see,” and he could tell she had known exactly what he was thinking all along. She had met his type before. No doubt she was chuckling to herself, behind her double chins. It was maddening.

He refused to say another word. She went back to her book, the hardcover book on Freud this time, and he pretended to consult some papers. He was seething. Yet what, after all, had she done? Nothing except leave him alone. Passive-aggressive, of course. She knew she couldn’t get his attention any other way. And he had fallen for it. That was how that kind of woman was; like his mother. They had to put you down, one way or another.

After the plane had landed, she retrieved her clothes bag from the rack up front, and left the plane before him. He saw her hurry up the enclosed walk into the terminal, where she disappeared.

Nor would he have dreamed of telling a word of this to anyone, if the police hadn’t got onto him. They’d traced him through the airline tickets. “But what have I to do with her?” he had asked at first. “We hardly talked; and then she vanished into the terminal.”

That was it, it transpired. She had vanished into the terminal and, as far as anyone could discover, out of the world. She hadn’t been heard from since.

He felt mildly triumphant hearing this, though he did not say so. He said he had hardly spoken to her; how could he possibly help them? It was only after careful questioning by the two investigators that the
whole story emerged. If it was a story. They got it on videotape, as it happened, so there it was, preserved forever. He had, at first, offered a dry account without any of his actual thoughts or angers, but the investigators got the entire narration in the end. Even long afterward, no one who had known her could decide if that had been a triumphant exit for the lady professor or, for her, just a characteristic exchange with that sort of professional man. They inclined, eventually, to the latter. After all, she had walked off into thin air, and no doubt men like this wonderful example had driven her to it. And yet—would she have wanted to give them the satisfaction of just disappearing? For who knew better than a woman professor that disappearing into thin air was what most professional men, given their druthers, would have required of her?

And there, for a time, the matter rested.

One

W
HEN
, after many months had passed and Kate Fansler was able calmly to review that frenzied year, it seemed to her portentously coincidental that it had begun with her thinking of le Carré’s George Smiley, whose final adventures against his Soviet enemy Karla she had just been reading. A sentence about Smiley had echoed in her mind as she made her reluctant way toward her old school to deliver a lecture. The school’s invitation was one to which she had found no suitable words of refusal. It was then she thought of Smiley: “With dismal foreboding, Smiley agreed on a date. After a lifetime of inventing cover stories for every occasion, he still found it impossible to talk his way out of a dinner invitation.”

Or an invitation to one’s old school, Kate assured
him, walking toward the crosstown bus. True, she had not had a lifetime of cover stories, she had kept one name and one identity, but while she had hardened her heart against many social occasions, against dinner parties, cocktail parties, and especially against reunions of any sort, a summons from her own school seemed immediately to lock her into an unwilling, deeply resented acquiescence.

Once on the bus, Kate brooded further. Having passed the statistical point of midlife—assuming greater length of life these days than the Bible’s conservative estimate—she had determined not to make policy, to decide on everything as it came along. Policy limited one and discouraged thought. All the same, it might have been said that she had a policy against returning to one’s old school or college, a policy the more stringent the more distant the return from one’s original attendance. Nonetheless here she was on her way to the Theban, the renowned girls’ private school from which she had graduated decades ago.

“Surely you aren’t thinking of going back to that place to give a talk!” Reed had said, astonished. Kate could see he was seriously worried, almost as though her going were a symptom of physical or intellectual decadence.

“I couldn’t refuse,” she had answered, grumbling the inevitable excuse of all those snared into accepting unwelcome invitations. “The headmistress asked me to give one of the talks for high school parents
this fall, and pointed out with a certain emphasis that I had refused every invitation to revisit the place since that incident with the dogs so long ago.”
¹

“But that was another headmistress,” Reed had said. He had always found the elegance of Kate’s education daunting.

“Of course it was; I didn’t owe that one a favor, as the hideous phrase goes. Rather the other way around. But it was this one I had to plead with twice to get in the brilliant child of a friend, the child having adamantly refused to behave in a way expected of an applicant to the Theban. To be both frank and crude, I rather thought my donations covered my part of the bargain, but of course the Theban never confuses money and service, and of course they shouldn’t.”

“Couldn’t someone else talk to the damn parents?” Reed had not unreasonably asked. They were having their evening drink, and as sometimes happened now when they had both had wearing days, the talk, although softened by alcohol and intimacy, had an irritable edge.

“I appear to be the only professor available for the job, and everyone has expressed, or is purported to have expressed, an interest in the academic situation of the moment. Aware of all the invective swirling around about the canon, and ‘political correctness’—that appalling and meaningless term—the Theban is, as it ever was, anxious to get all the
facts and make up its own mind. I clung to the last possible straw by saying that I wasn’t exactly impartial in this matter: I did not admire a single thing accomplished in the terrible Republican eighties, and I think the right wing’s influence on the country and on public opinion has done terrible damage to us all. Since the Theban always begins by embracing impartiality, I thought that would get me out of the whole thing. Not at all. The Theban, in the person of the current headmistress, was certain I would make my partiality clear, and proceed from there; besides, I suspect they agree with me. Educational funding was horribly cut in the eighties. Still, it is reassuring that such principles of tolerance survive in this world, even if they are but meager sparks.”

“But you feel compelled to fan them,” Reed said. It wasn’t quite a question.

“Oh, who the hell knows?” Kate had peevishly responded, and she felt equally peevish now, recalling the conversation. She had not kept up with any of her classmates from the Theban; time and the pressures of life had taken care of that. What she lacked, unlike those who haunted reunions and exchanged Christmas newsletters, was much curiosity about what had become of her classmates, or how they now looked; certainly she had no wish to learn how many children (grandchildren? Surely not!) they all had. Like all those who had neither borne nor adopted children, Kate found the constant emphasis on progeny tedious and irritating, the more
so in that one was not expected to confess such unwomanly indifference.

As the bus entered the transverse Kate tried to divert her thoughts with contemplation of Central Park. Like the Theban, Central Park offered nostalgia, had Kate been inclined that way, which she was not. Some English writer had commented that nostalgia was a “disabling pressure which signifies retreat,” and Kate concurred with that wisdom. The park had changed: well, why not? All life changes, but only fools think it has reached its ideal at the exact point where they entered. She stared at the stone walls of the transverse, blackened with soot, at the litter, at the stalled car pulled ineffectually to the side, for the road, serving two-way traffic, consisted of only two lanes with little shoulder room. Above the blackened walls, she could see the Fifty-ninth Street skyline, and the sun glinting off the buildings. Then she was upon the children’s zoo. She had never taken a child there, but she had from time to time visited the Central Park Zoo to browse among the seals and the polar bears, and the king penguins, whose parenting habits were described on the signs with frank amazement: the male alone looked after the hatching egg. And then there were the snow monkeys, who had had, one cold winter, to be removed to warmer quarters: they were, it seemed, less suited to American than Japanese urban cold.

Central Park has hills I used to sled on, Kate thought, surrendering to memory and its inevitable
resentments, hills now flattened for endless expansion of the Metropolitan Museum, providing them with more galleries than they can guard, therefore more than they can open. And where in Central Park was the Shakespeare garden? Farther uptown, she seemed to remember. She had not visited it since being conducted through it as a child. It was said that every plant mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays grew there. Kate, who could scarcely tell a narcissus from a hyacinth, a primrose from a pansy, and had not the faintest idea what chamomile looked like, though she remembered well enough Falstaff’s words about it—oh, the hell with Central Park, though in fact Kate loved it still. She did, however, remind herself that Central Park contained only two statues of famous women: Mother Goose and Alice in Wonderland. She supposed one would have to include the new mammoth bear at the playground on East Seventy-ninth Street, female, one supposed, since it sported on each side a cub. Male bears, one understood, went their solitary unencumbered way. And then the bus had come to the end of its route, and the driver opened the doors with a finality that demanded the immediate departure of all within. Kate began the familiar trudge along the avenue to the Theban.

“I must begin,” Kate said into the microphone, facing the parents, some alumnae of the faithful sort and, she noted with dismay, what appeared to be the greater part of the upper-school faculty, “by frankly
stating that although I shall try fairly to present the arguments on both sides of today’s academic debates, I am myself on one side, and do not believe that someone on the other side would speak to you as fairly as I shall try to do, or would deny his or her conviction that that side alone spoke for the good and the true. I hope this makes my impartiality clear.”