No Perfect Secret (7 page)

“You’re not
—you are so far from boring it doesn’t even register on a scale. Anyway, I like listening to you. You sound like home.” He watched her eyes flicker with a sudden panic and wondered what he’d said to set it off. Had the waiter not then arrived at his elbow, Caburn had the distinct impression she would’ve grabbed her purse and decamped.

He placed their order
s, deciding upon a fifteen-year-old single malt scotch for himself. Once he had a sip, he knew he’d order another.

Anna barely wet her lips on the rim of the Cosmopolitan. Beyond the wide windows of the restaurant, full dark had descended. Headlights streamed up and down 15th Street. A few tables to her left, a group of fresh-faced teenaged Congressional pages, still in their uniforms, were pretending sophistication, but their giggling and hamburgers completely refuted the image. Was I ever that young
? Anna wondered. Soft laughter, and the delicate clink of cutlery barely penetrated her sudden fugue. She was looking at Caburn, but his features were out of focus. “I hope you haven’t tricked me,” she said.

“I...
I really didn’t want to have a conversation with your mother-in-law hovering. I do have some news to share with you. I admit, I could’ve told you right there on your sidewalk—” Trying to keep to the truth made Caburn feel he was rolling huge stones up a glass mountain. In a flash of insight, he knew he wanted this woman in his life. Not that it was love at first sight, or anything like that. She would be an interesting person to know. He also knew he had to safeguard his integrity because once she understood the magnitude of her husband’s deceit, she would never again be tolerant of even a hint of duplicity, prevarication, or mendacity.

“Tell me now,” she said.

“Your husband isn’t going to be home before the first of the year. I wasn’t scamming you yesterday. I just got word this morning.”

“Where is he?” A few heartbeats later her told her.

“Paris.”

Her mind raced backwards, recalling Christmas holidays in France. Fêtes began on December 6 and didn’t stop until the Epiphany, celebrated on the 8th of January. Some of the local students had volunteered to cater private parties, but she, along with other foreign students had traveled by train around the country to take in other celebrations. Her mind’s eye remembered the bre
athtaking beauty of la Fête de Lumieres in Lyons when every inhabitant—rich and poor—put candles in every window of their homes to light up the city.

“Paris?” she said, astonished. “And you can’t get him home?”

“He’s tied up in a bunch of bureaucratic red tape.”

“But...
He’s a US citizen. Are you telling me the State Department can’t get an American citizen home?”

Caburn chewed on his lower lip. No matter what he said, it was going to come back and bite him in the ass. “I’m sorry. We can’t. There’s an ongoing investigation.”

Anna’s hand tightened on the napkin in her lap. It took a few seconds for her to regain her equilibrium. “If you’re inferring... Kevin would never betray his country.
Never
.” She paused for a moment. “He was devastated when the towers fell—and the Pentagon—”

“The entire country was that,” Caburn injected.

“I know—but after the FAA allowed planes to fly again, he was assigned a carry. He—was changed. He wasn’t frightened, I don’t mean that. Later, we even drove up to New York for the ceremony to turn on the sky lights, the ones that—”

“I know the ones you mean.”

“When the President announced Bin Laden was dead, he got up and hung our flag off the porch.” She shook her head. “No. Kevin isn’t a traitor. You’d never get me to believe that.”

Oh, man, I’m stepping in it
, Caburn thought. “You jumped to the wrong conclusion. I can tell you the investigation is not going in that direction. Not at all.”
But he sure as hell betrayed you. lady. “
It’s just there are some anomalies.”

Their food came. Caburn thanked the server, and ordered another scotch.

Anna smoothed her napkin. She was relieved, but not by much. “May I talk to Kevin. Can he call me? E-mail me?”

Caburn shook his head. He picked up his knife and fork.
Oh, dear God. This was not a good idea. What had he been thinking?
“If I could make that happen, Anna, I would.”

She looked down at her plate. It was a beautiful presentation
—as fine as any chef had constructed at
Le Cordon Bleu.
Somewhere in the deepest regions of her being she knew her marriage was over. During the past months—no, she admonished herself—during the past
years
—she had spent hundreds of waking hours exorcizing doubts.
Anomalies
. What did that mean? She suspected Kevin had been caught having an unsuitable affair. Her throat was arid. She took a sip of her drink. She was not going to allow the desolation to overwhelm her in public. She looked out the window. “It’s beginning to snow.” Then down at her food again. “This looks terrific,” she said, and cut herself a small bite of Flat Iron beef.

Anna
refused dessert, an aperitif, and coffee. When the bill came she tucked three twenties into the leather wallet. Caburn added four more, giving the server a substantial tip. It was, after all, Christmas holidays.

She gazed out the passenger window all the way back to her house. She did not mention a Christmas tree, and did not wait for Caburn to open her door, a courtesy she had extended to him earlier.

He watched her safely into her house. While snow gently blanked the car windows, he put his hand on the back of the passenger seat, feeling the warmth she’d left behind. He kept his hand there until he had drawn into himself all of the fragrance and essence she’d left behind. He had the uncharitable thought that if Kevin Nesmith had not already been dead, he was angry enough to throttle the son of a bitch himself.

CHAPTER FOUR

Caburn stopped short
in the corridor before he passed Henry Stimson’s old desk. A rat the size of Mt Everest was eating out of the cat feeder. Caburn moved against the opposite wall and slid past.

“Ugh,” said Helen when he came into the office. “You look like you just jumped out of a pickle jar.”

Caburn hung his coat on the wobbly coat tree in the corner. He brushed the snow from his hat, reset the block with his fingers, and put it atop his coat. He went into the closet and made coffee. When his cup was half full he sat in the wooden barrel-backed chair in front of Helen’s desk. “Tell me something, Helen. When you get to the office first—why don’t you ever make the coffee?”

“And be a slave to you men? Sorry
—been there, done that.”

Caburn’s eyes widened.

“Don’t look so surprised, Frank.” With thumb and forefinger she pulled the sagging skin up from her neck and chin. “Back in the day, I was considered a classic beauty.” She dropped her hands.

If there had been beauty there, Caburn couldn’t see it, but he told her he did, because he wanted a gigantic favor. He sipped his coffee. “Helen, I’ll give you a thousand dollars to take over this Nesmith thing for me.”

“I’d love to take your money, Frank. But I’ve read the file—and all the dispatches that have come in. I wouldn’t do it for ten. I’d rather be having a cocktail with the devil than sitting across from those women when they learn the truth.” The old coffeemaker sputtered. Helen went to get herself a cup. When she was behind her desk again, Caburn said:

“What I don’t get is why
Nesmith didn’t just divorce her. It wouldn’t have jeopardized his job. It would’ve been clean—and we wouldn’t have this mess to clear up.”

“Sometimes you’re as dumb as a rock, Frank. Some men don’t want to be bothered with doing the right thing. They get off on fooling everybody. It makes them feel clever, superior. Plus, they like the excitement. It gives them a high. The first wife has got this great job;
Nesmith has access to her paychecks. She paid the down payment on the house. She looks after his mother. If he divorced her, he’d have to take his mother with him. What would that do to his other little love nest? Didn’t I hear you tell Albert the mother was loony tunes?”

“I already asked about the money. There’s a household account; they both contribute to that. The remainder stays in their respective personal accounts. Anna told me they don’t let the mother pay for anything. This isn’t about money.”

“You know what I like about you, Frank? You’re a bumpkin from Kansas, and in all the years you’ve been in Washington, you haven’t lost that Midwestern naiveté. That’s got to be a record for
Believe it or Not, or
a
Guinness
world record.”

“I didn’t know you liked me.”

“See—that’s what I mean. Top of your graduating class and you still don’t have a clue. What do you wanna bet—Nesmith looks after his mother’s money and skims some cream. He’s the only son, right? It’s the same old, same old—having your cake and eating it, too.” She moved from behind her desk. “I’ve got to clean the litter box, set out food and water for that damned cat. After that I’m out of here.”

“Uh, Helen, do you think there are rats down here?”

“Don’t be silly. Why do you think I tolerate that maniac. It feeds off mice and roaches.”

“When’s the last time you saw it?”

She thought about it. “Ten days—about.”

“It’s got to be at least ten or twelve years old. How do you know it’s not curled up dead behind some of that junk in the hall?”

“It empties its food bowl every day. Dead cats don’t eat.” She tossed him an inter-office envelope. “Here, I picked this up in the mail room. Albert’s not here, so I guess, it’s yours.”

While Helen was doing cat/rat duties, Caburn unwound the string loop and dumped the contents of the envelope onto her desk. Somebody at the embassy in France must’ve yielded to Albert’s request. The items were some of Nesmith’s personals. His State Department ID, his passport, a key ring, his wallet, and the proverbial little black book. In an aside Caburn wondered how they’d get Nesmith through Customs and Immigration without his passport and two picture IDs. Homeland Security insisted even the dead had to be searched against smuggling drugs, counterfeit currency, bombs, anthrax, and a whole host of other bio weapons.

Nesmith’s little book was a fine gray moleskin with his name and the year embossed in gold in the lower right hand corner. It was about the size of a deck of cards.

Caburn sat back and thumbed through it quickly. It was a compendium of flight numbers, travel times, departures, arrivals, and off days. At the top of each page, near the printed date number was some sort of scientific symbol penciled in. Some dates were circled with initials insid
e the circle. Some dates were X’d out. In the lined pages at the front and back of the books, were phone numbers—work numbers, landlines and cells. Below the phone numbers were e-mail addresses. The very last few pages functioned as an address book.

The florescent lights overhead began to buzz and wink as Helen returned to the office. She looked at the ceiling. “I guess Dracula is trying to wake up.”

Or the rats were eating the electrical wires, thought Caburn. He handed the moleskin book to her. “What do you make of this?”

She leafed through the book. “This is the medical symbol for female,” she told him, tipping the book so he could see.
“There’s a pattern....” She thumbed the pages back and forth for a moment. “Here’s one of his return flights, two—no three days before Thanksgiving. He returned stateside on the 21st, then has a line drawn through November 22 and 23. He delivers again on the 28th returns on the 29th. There’s a line drawn through November 30th and December 1st. I don’t know what it means. It looks like he’s making extensions of some sort. Then every time there’s the female symbol he has the dates blacked out for a week to ten days. Weird.”

“You think I ought to run this over the FBI for analysis?”

“Oh, funny. That’d be worth your job.” She fingered the moleskin. “This has been personalized. You ought to check with Anna Nesmith, see if there are books for years past. You could reference all the phone numbers and addresses, and put the whole caboodle on Albert’s desk Monday morning. What’s in his wallet?”

“I didn’t go through it. It’s creepy going through a dead man’s wallet.”

Helen rolled her eyes, and picked it up. “It’ll have to be inventoried.” She riffled though the dollars slot. “There’s more than three hundred in US and about sixty in euros. Oh, God. Here’s a pack of condoms.” A slip of paper fell out. Helen studied it a few seconds. “This is from National. His car is in long-term parking. I guess you can have it towed.”

“To where?”

“Our garage? I mean all this stuff is Nesmith’s personal effects, except for the State Department ID. It’ll have to be given to his wife—wives.”

Caburn gathered everything up, except for the moleskin. He tossed the condoms into the trash. No way would he pass those to Anna. Everything else he shoved back into the envelope. “Let’s just
save this for Albert on Monday. I gotta go wash my hands.”

”Sounds like a plan,” Helen said. “Now, I’m out of here
—hand over the forty-six dollars you owe me from yesterday.”