Past Perfect Read Online Free PDF Page B

tyrannize the newest director and overrule him on any script issues the first day of taping a new episode.
    However, reality and I had never enjoyed spending much time together, so my mind reverted from Oliver to its usual occupation, fantasy. As the riser of each stair was steep enough to qualify as step-aerobic gear for an advanced class, I had plenty of time to imagine my cell ringing. I would answer a little breathlessly and Lisa would say, Sorry it took me so long to get back to you. I had to locate a safe land-line. A pay phone. These days it’s so hard to find one that’s working and not totally, totally crudded up so you don’t even want to touch it.
    For some reason, that thought kicked off a memory of going to a big shoe sale with Lisa not long after we met. I’d watched as, with the concentration of a chef examining produce for a three-star restaurant, she’d scrupulously checked over the size sevens. She was in the middle of outfitting an East German national the Agency had spirited out and was resettling in the United States in some state that (the émigré’s personal request being honored) had no harsh winters. Anyway, somewhere between flats and heels, Lisa got into a conversation with a woman about our age who was also checking out the size seven racks. Innocuous chatter about the fad of displaying what they were then calling “toe cleavage.” As Lisa spoke, the woman, who’d been the one to initiate the conversation, started backing away.
    Why? Something about Lisa’s delivery put people off. I’d watched, fascinated that after retreating from Lisa’s mile-high voice, the woman picked up a short brown boot and clutched it to her chest, almost like a shield. She edged back so far that she banged into a six-and-a-half rack just as Lisa was droning, “… makes your feet look crippled because the front, where your toes are, looks so wide and …”
    I could hear too the personality glitch that was disturbing that other shopper. The unnatural slowness of Lisa’s delivery. This tic might have been an asset working with foreign nationals who couldn’t speak much English, but her too-slow talking obviously made her fellow Americans uneasy. No matter what she was saying, it began to come across as inappropriate after a minute or two. Flirtatious? Could “the front, where your toes are, looks so wide” sound like a fetishistic sexual innuendo? Or maybe the slowness made her every word sound teasing or snide: There’s more to what I’m saying than what I’m saying.
    Well, maybe there was.

Chapter Four
    LISA WASN’T AROUND the day the CIA got rid of me, or at least I didn’t see her. She was probably in New Mexico or North Dakota teaching some ex-Polish commie big shot how to eat Kentucky Fried Chicken. But everyone else, from my boss, Benton Mattingly, to the woman wheeling the mail cart, had observed me being more conveyed than escorted to my office by two guys from the Office of Personnel Security, both of whom could be mistaken for albino gorillas. They were not all that tall, but they were hulking. Also, both had those small eyes and cone-shaped heads that connote the lack of a subscription to THE NEW REPUBLIC.
    They stood offensively close to me, glaring as I gathered up my mug and my pictures. Adam and I were scheduled to go to Wyoming to visit his family and there was a shopping bag full of presents for them I’d bought the day before during an overly long lunch hour— that couldn’t be the reason for my disgrace, could it? —and had forgotten to bring home. The two gorillas made me take off all the ribbons and wrapping paper and pawed over my mother-in-law’s blue flannel robe with green piping and my niece’s white-gowned Barbie while half the unit, no doubt, hearing that something big was afoot, came sauntering by.
    Even though I couldn’t think of anything I’d done wrong, I felt so ashamed. I spotted my friend Martha, an Albania specialist, in the back of the group watching me