An Imperfect Spy

by Amanda Cross

  “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.

  “It’s time you handed on your wisdom to the new boys, Ned,” he had told me over a suspiciously good lunch at the Connaught. “And to the new girls,” he added, with a loathsome smirk. “They’ll be letting them into the Church next, I suppose.”

  —JOHN LE CARRÉ

  THE SECRET PILGRIM

  Three

  THE next morning, when Kate had got herself up, fed, and ready to face the day, she found a message on her answering machine from Blair Whitson, who reminded her that he was the one who was going to teach the course with her at Schuyler Law and added that he was eager to meet with her. How about lunch today at the Oak Room of the Plaza? He gave his number.

  Kate called it, getting his message machine. Kate had got quite used to this exchange of machines, and even thought there was a good deal to be said for it; it allowed
tedious arrangements to be made without superfluous interchange or chat, and if one screened calls, it gave one some control over whom one talked to, and when. Also, at least for Kate, the fact remained that if you had something serious to say to a person, it was better said across a table in a pleasant restaurant or, at any rate, face-to-face rather than over the telephone. Machine messages thus happily tended to postpone conversations to the place of meeting. She left a message on Blair Whitson’s machine to say she never went out to lunch, but how about dinner tonight in the Oak Room? If yes, say when. If no, say when and where. Reed was going to be busy all evening, and the Oak Room at the Plaza always pleasantly revived in Kate the change from the years when they wouldn’t let women in to dine with the men. One needed to assure oneself from time to time that some things do change and, more important these days, stay changed.

  She went off to a faculty meeting that she felt required to attend even though she was on leave, and returned to find the completion of arrangements mechanically recorded: 7:30 tonight at the Oak Room. He would recognize her. How? Kate wondered. The table was reserved in his name, should he be delayed.

  He was not delayed.

  He was at the table when she arrived, stood to greet her, helped her to seat herself, and asked what she wanted to drink. Then he sat down, and Kate reflected that he was certainly the most improbable male revolutionary she had ever encountered. But then, Reed had said he had only recently become a revolutionary; all he wanted, after all, was a real clinic and a law and literature course. Perhaps at Schuyler, at least as Harriet saw it, that was sufficient to qualify one as a revolutionary.

  Blair in fact looked, if one had to resort to typecasting, like an admiral who had reached the pinnacle of his profession young. No, she thought, rather like the captain of a ship plying northern seas in the kind of films they used to make about World War II.

  Kate lowered her eyes and sipped her drink. A most unfeminist question and unfeminist thoughts: was she really wondering why a man that, well, that manly, should be worried about literature and the law, let alone women and the law? One day she would ask him. Looks, after all, she reminded herself sternly, told one little of significance.

  “I came to law rather late,” he said, as though he had read her mind. “Before that I did nothing but ‘mess about with boats.’ Isn’t that a literary quotation of some sort?”

  “The Wind in the Willows, I think. Ratty perhaps. Mole was the one with windfalls from aunts. That’s my favorite phrase.”

  “It’s wonderful to have a literary mind. Anyhow, one day I decided, if I’m going to help fix up the mess in this country, I better stop messing with boats and learn the law. Or maybe I tired of the naval hierarchy and decided to explore the legal hierarchy instead. So here we are, discussing how we can do a little to revive the faculty of the Schuyler Law School. They’re so far entrenched in old ways of thinking, and so self-satisfied in their entrenchment, that I don’t put it past them to think that those who bother them, or want to change their golden ways, should be snuffed out. That is, if ridicule and nastiness have failed. Cheers.”

  “Cheers,” Kate answered. “Would you mind telling me how you were able to recognize me?”

  “No problem. So nice to be able to use that phrase, since so often there is a problem. I went to hear my old pal Reed Amhearst lecture on one of the newest wrinkles in criminal law; you were pointed out to me afterward as his lit-crit wife; you had come to hear him. I remembered that when I had to think of a literary type to help me teach this course. I thought, you see, you might be more amenable to adventures in legal realms because of your husband. And then with him doing the clinic, I thought we might as well take up nepotism as well as revolution. Would you like another drink or shall we order?”

  “Let’s order, by all means,” Kate said, feeling rather breathless. First it had been Harriet, now Blair. Reed was going to do a clinic for them while she was teaching a course, and so far everyone they’d met had been surprising. Was that a good sign?

  When they had ordered, Kate sat there, feeling somehow the pawn of destiny, and admiring his hair, straight, with some gray beginning, and lying thick like an animal’s pelt; his vivid blue eyes, blue, no doubt, from staring at the sea, looked at her, smiling. You’ll be writing romantic fiction next, she told herself.

  Without waiting for their food to arrive, Blair Whitson apologized for launching into the topic of their proposed course immediately, and then launched. “The fact is,” he said, “if we’re going to do this course, we’ve got to start planning yesterday. Sorry to pressure you, but isn’t life, at least academic life, always that way? First it’s don’t do today what you can put off to tomorrow, and then it’s hurry up, this stuff was needed yesterday. I’m sure you understand what I mean. I know, I know,” he added before Kate could respond, although for once she was thinking and hadn’t got yet to a response, “I’m pushing you. Of course I am. The class starts late next week. We can muddle through the first meeting with reading lists and gab about papers, participation, the usual. But after that, of course, we’re going to have to say something both literary and legal.”

  “Simultaneously?” Kate asked. She leaned back in her chair and took in the scene. The Oak Room at the Plaza, when you got right down to it, was an odd place to plan a revolution, or even a course on literature and law. For some idiotic reason, Kate thought of a story she had heard about Marlene Dietrich arriving in some elegant dining place just like this wearing white tie and tails. “We do not allow women in trousers,” the maître d’ had proclaimed. With which Dietrich took off the trousers and tossed them aside. It helped, of course, to have gorgeous legs.

  “As near simultaneously as possible,” he answered. “I don’t mean we have to both talk at once, but that we both talk on whatever the reading is—literature or law. Is that all right with you?”

  “Sounds lovely,” Kate said.

  “Do I catch an ironic note?” he asked. “I was told you wear irony the way some women wear perfume.”

  He had begun to flirt, a younger man with a woman just the right number of years older.

  “It’s a good defense,” she said. “Against many things. Oddly enough, the only thing I find it difficult to be ironic about is the misuse of words for no decent reason.”

  “What words, though I hardly dare to ask? I probably misuse them all.”

  “Since you ask, disinterested to mean uninterested; transpired to mean happened; and a recent candidate, serendipitously to mean by chance. Now that I have established myself as a pedant, have you had any ideas about particular texts, or legal briefs, if that’s what they’re called?”

  “Yes, I have,” he said, obviously trying to remember if he had misused these words, and producing some papers just in time almost to collide with the waiter serving their first course. He handed her the sheets of paper. “These are the legal readings I thought we might use. Michael M. v. Superior Court, for instance, is a case of statutory rape which might go with some novel or other. About the rights of a woman to say no and mean it.”

  “Jude the Obscure,” Kate said. “I think this is going to be possible. But isn’t reading a case—how long is a case?—and a novel all at once rather a monumental assignment?”

  “That’s what we need to work out. I was hoping you would turn out to be an authority on shorter works of fiction. Or even chapters, if one can suggest so unliterary a practice.”

  “Give me a minute,” Kate said. “I’ve no doubt we can work it out, but could we look for a moment at the larger picture? The law school, I mean, into which we are going to shoehorn this fascinating course.”

  “Of course. Shall I start at the beginning, anyway, the place where I come in?”

  “The beginning is often a good place to start,” Kate said solemnly. “I somehow get the impression that the Schuyler Law School is not exactly the cat’s pajamas, but no one has told me why, apart from the fact that it isn’t Harvard or Yale. Fact and frankness will be welcome.
”

  “Fair enough. I’m really delighted that Reed is going to do a clinic for us. You’re more luck than I had dared to hope for, or to imagine that the guardian angels of women’s rights and minority culture might grant.”

  “Let’s get to the angels later,” Kate said. “Let’s start with where you come in. Although,” she felt constrained to add, not believing in angels, but not wanting to offend any should they somehow hover, “Reed’s doing the clinic certainly does seem to have taken a certain amount of intervention on your part, and if the angels helped, so much the better. Proceed, please.”

  “Let’s begin with the faculty,” he said. “All male, and all certain that what they don’t know and believe isn’t worth knowing. I hardly have to describe them, except that they are beginning to smell the danger of new ideas and are rallying the troops. Or, as they say where I used to live, the wind is rising.”

  “Well, I gather it’s not a law school anyone thinks of as prestigious,” Kate said between mouthfuls. “Is this the same dynamic as in terrible schools in English novels; the worse the school, the crueler the teachers?”

  “You may be right; I did spend two days with Nicholas Nickleby when it was on Broadway. But law schools are a little different. Unprestigious, Schuyler Law may be, but most of the faculty got their degrees at Harvard Law or Yale Law or Chicago Law and have been floating on that fact ever since. Maybe they published a casebook; they haven’t published anything else. They don’t really think, in my opinion, but they insist on all the old ways that have served so many years and ought to go on serving in a sane—that is, white—male world. Almost half the students are women, of course, and many of the students are minorities, but that’s all the more reason to imbue them with the law as it should be practiced.”

  “Have there been many rambles from the women and minorities?” Kate asked as her main course was served. “Are the masses stirring?”