An Imperfect Spy Read Free Page B

time either with the dispossessed or the desperately frightened. Not that you’re worse than anyone else from the same background. In fact, you’re much better, which is why I seek your acquaintance.”
    Kate looked at the woman as though she feared her drink had contained not vodka but some hallucinogenic drug that the woman had been willing to share because she had developed a tolerance for it. Pull yourself together, Kate, she admonished herself. Her back was already signaling less than absolute delight with its position on the child-sized desk, and if she wasn’t drugged, she was certainly cornered by a fanatic.
    “I hope I haven’t offended you. I do admire you; I hope that’s clear.”
    “You haven’t offended me,” Kate said, “though I can’t guess”—she was suddenly overcome with irritation and pushed herself from the desk onto her feet—“why we’re having this conversation, even if you do work in the secretarial room of the Schuyler Law School. I’m sure you’re right about me, though I can’t imagine how you found all that out, let alone why you wanted to. As to my life, I console myself with the thought that we must all work where we are, do what we can. I don’t cross over the edge, butI stay as close to it as I can without falling apart and doing no good whatever. Perhaps,” she added, “that’s all just self-justification.” But why do I keep answering her? Kate wondered.
    “Thank you for that,” the woman said. “I’ve crossed over the edge, and nothing learned at the Theban or afterward would have enabled anyone to do that. If you understand that, you understand a good deal.”
    “I understand nothing,” Kate said. “I’ve finished my drink, and these damn desks are in no way appropriate to the mature physique.” She rubbed her back. “Might we get to the point of how I can help you?”
    “I don’t need your help,” the woman said. “I just thought we might meet. I wanted to get a line on you, if truth be told. Well, bye-bye.”
    And with a comically girlish wave, she walked out of the room, leaving Kate staring after her in wonder.
    “I don’t get it,” was Reed’s comment after Kate had arrived home demanding that he listen to her day’s adventures rather more urgently than usual. He hardly commented on her lecture at the Theban, on which she had not, in any case, lingered, but had followed with rather more attention her conversation with the nameless woman. “I can’t imagine what she wanted from you, or why you even listened to her,” he said, somewhat testily, and they went on to talk of other things.
    “It’s a funny thing,” Reed said later that nightwhen he was undressing. He paused with his hands on his belt. “Nobody ever wanders into my office or my lectures the way they do with you, demanding acquaintance and conversation in the most amazing circumstances.”
    “That’s because I, unlike you, am an amateur detective with a reputation to be envied,” Kate answered. They were both feeling much better.
    On the following Sunday morning, Reed was cooking bacon in a frying pan when Kate joined him. She stood in the kitchen doorway regarding him: tall, frowning, his glasses fogging slightly as he concentrated on turning the pieces of bacon and separating them in the pan. She found him, at that moment, utterly endearing. She chuckled.
    “I know, I know,” he said, smiling. “I ought to do them in the broiler, but there are some ways in which I prefer to stick to the simpler, more primitive methods.”
    Kate perched on a high stool they kept in the kitchen for just such moments. It was a large kitchen, and she had often thought of furnishing it with an easy chair, but somehow had never got around to it.
    “It’s not the way you cook bacon, of which I highly approve,” she said. “I was thinking about descriptions of rooms in books I’ve read, current novels. No one can enter a room anymore, even to murder or interrogate the occupant, without