I was behind my desk. In my Aeron chair. With the right-hand top drawer of my desk open, and a cup of fresh coffee in my hand. I drank some. And looked at her knees. And waited.
After a little while she shifted her gaze from the snowfall to me.
“When I was with the Bureau,” she said, “before Missy was born, I was young, single, and ferocious. I was going to prove something. I was going to be the best goddamned agent since Melvin Purvis.”
“That’s the spirit,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “Seems kind of, what? Pathetic, now all this time later. What we know about the Bureau. What we know about the government. What we know about . . .” She shrugged. “What we know about everything.”
“We all gotta forgive ourselves our youth,” I said.
“But it was kind of pathetic,” she said. “Doesn’t it sound pathetic?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Some.”
She looked relieved, as if I’d complimented her.
“I was in Chicago,” she said. “And we were working on a case involving art theft from a private collector in Evanston.”
“Where Northwestern is,” I said. Just to let her know I was alert.
“Yuh. There were several of us on it; the guy they were stolen from was connected in D.C. I was the only female, and I outworked all of them. We always had a lot of money to pay for information. Local cops resented us for that.”
“They never had enough,” I said.
“No. I got a lead from a snitch, I don’t even remember the details. They may have tried to recruit him for something. He told me about a gang of art thieves that he said had something to do with the World War Two prisons or something, and how a lot of Jews got killed.”
She paused and drank some coffee and smiled very slightly.
“He told me all this like it was news. I don’t think he’d ever heard of the Holocaust and was only vaguely aware of World War Two.”
“Snitches don’t always have a broad historical perspective,” I said.
“Probably why they’re snitches,” she said. “Anyway, the tip was good. It led me to a guy who was apparently in the business of finding and liberating Jewish-owned art stolen by the Nazis.”
“Still?” I said.
“Well, we’re talking twenty years ago,” she said. “But yes, still.”
“Holocaust throws a long shadow,” I said. “Doesn’t it.”
“Yes. So I confront this guy, and he’s, like, unshakeable. Doesn’t deny. Doesn’t admit. And is so charming about it,” she said. “I spent a lot of time with him, working on him. But more and more I was spending it because I wanted to. I started looking forward to seeing him again. And I could tell, I thought, that he felt the same way.”
“Until one day . . .” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “In a room at the Park Hyatt near the water tower off Michigan Avenue.”
“I know where it is,” I said.
“It became our place,” she said. “We didn’t go there all the time. We couldn’t afford it. But on special dates. You know, our one-week anniversary. Our one-month anniversary . . .”
She stopped talking for a bit and looked through my window at the soft snow.
“Pathetic,” she said.
“No,” I said. “A run like that isn’t pathetic. It may be ill-advised. Might even be contrived. Might be cathexis and not love. But the feelings are real when you have them. And they are not valueless.”
“ ‘Cathexis’?”
“Libidinal energy,” I said. “Sorry. I’m in love with a shrink.”
“And it’s different than love?”
“The shrink I’m in love with says so.”
“I wonder how much shrinks know about love?” she said.
“Mine knows a lot,” I said. “But not, I think, because she’s a shrink. How soon did you get pregnant?”
“You know where this is going,” she said.
“I think so.”
“Maybe you and I are developing some cathexis?” she said.
“Absolutely,” I said. “But my shrink won’t let me.”
“I was pregnant the second month we were together,” she said.
“I assume the investigation had slowed during this period.”
“Worse,” she said. “I warned him what we had.”
“How’d he take to the pregnancy?” I said.
“He wanted me to abort,” she said.
“And?”
She shook her head.
“I had already sold out the Bureau for him,” she said. “I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t kill the baby for him.”
“How’d he take that?”
“He said there were things he had to do, and they didn’t include marriage and children.”
“He have numbers tattooed on his forearm?”
“Yes.”
“The baby was Missy?”
“Yes.”
“And the father was Ariel Herzberg,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
53
Her eyes had filled with tears. I handed her a box of Kleenex and took her coffee cup and poured her some fresh coffee. I looked at my watch; it was two in the afternoon. Late enough in the day. I took a bottle of Irish whiskey from a drawer in my file cabinet and held it up. She stared blankly at it for a moment, then nodded. I poured some into the coffee and gave her back her cup.
“You had the baby alone,” I said.
She sipped her enhanced coffee.
“Yes,” she said. “I obviously couldn’t let the Bureau know what was going on. So I took a leave. My doctor, a lovely woman named Martha Weidhaus, contrived me a medical reason. I had the baby, hired a nanny, and went back to work.”
“Pressed for money?” I said.
“Of course,” she said. “Ariel would occasionally send some, for which I was grateful. But I could never count on it.”
“Did you see him?”
“No. After I got pregnant he disappeared.”
“What does Missy know about him?” I said.
“I told her he was dead,” Winifred said. “And she bought that, though she still wanted to know about him, what his name was, what he was like, what he worked at, how we had met. I created quite an admirable fictional character over the years.”
“Anyone ask you about that case you had in Chicago?”
“Often,” Winifred said. “It kept poking at me with its nose. Like a dog at suppertime. It’s one of the reasons I left, and took this job.”
“Plus better pay,” I said. “And no heavy lifting.”
She nodded.
“Missy is seeing Ariel. Does she know who he is?”
“Yes,” Winifred said. “He showed up one day when she was sixteen and introduced himself.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“It wasn’t the way to do it,” she said. “And I don’t know how much damage it did. But Ariel always wanted what he wanted and didn’t think much about damage . . . to others. She got a little hysterical at me for lying to her, at him for not being there, but he talked to her, and I watched her fall in love with him the way I did.”
“Why did he show up?”
“I don’t know,” Winifred said. “I never knew why he sent us money when he did. I never know why he does what he does. But I am almost certain it is finally in his own best interest, not someone else’s.”
“He hang around for a while?” I said.
“Yes, still does. He and I have not taken up again. I’m older and wiser. But he sees Missy regularly. I have warned her about him. But she is . . . She is infatuated with him . . . like I was. She wanted to be an art major. And she wanted to go to Walford. He got her in. ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘I have a friend there.’”
“Ashton Prince,” I said.
“Yes.”
“What do they do together?” I said.
She shook her head and drank some coffee.