Past Perfect Read Free Page A

CV as if I’d never been there? I don’t really know. Maybe it meant too much to pretend it hadn’t happened. Maybe if I couldn’t have the CIA, I didn’t really want to work at all.
    My only credential besides demonstrating overpriced cookware was that, from both fiction and life, I had some knowledge of spying. Desperate for something to do, I decided to write a spy novel. Had I always secretly burned to write fiction? God, no. But as I read more and more espionage novels, I began thinking, I could do this. And I did. Spy Guys, the novel, took me two years. Writing it was so lonely and tedious that, in comparison, my days in due diligence meetings in the Winters & McVickers, Investment Bankers, fourteenth-floor, windowless conference room seemed like Fun Fest USA.
    Surprise, the book was published, and with some success. While I was trying to write the sequel (a task my publisher seemed only slightly more interested in than I), QTV came along and inquired: Was I interested in developing Spy Guys as a weekly, hour-long television show?
    “Listen, Kathy,” the development executive I had asked five minutes earlier to call me Katie said, “let me be straight with you. Okay? Okay. You’ve got to be willing to make certain changes with one of the leads.” He told me I could keep Jamie the tough but beautiful and lovable streetwise New York cop turned CIA agent. But I’d need to change the other main character from Mitteleuropa deposed prince with a goatee into a clean-shaven, minor Spanish royal.
    Not just any minor Spanish royal. Development Guy went on to explain that through some labyrinthine link to Queen Victoria, His Highness would be fifteenth in line for the British throne. That way, his dialogue could include witty Prince William and Prince Harry references. Oh, and best of all, he’d be played by Javiero Rojas, a gorgeous but not-very-good singer from Chile turned egregiously bad actor, though still gorgeous. Then Development Guy said, “The truth, Kathy. Doesn’t it sound like fun?” The truth was, creating a TV show sounded better than sitting alone in a room for a couple of years getting wired on Diet Coke and trying to write a book.
    Back to the afternoon four weeks ago, when that voice from the past, Lisa Golding, called me. “Katie, you’re the only one I know who has big-time TV connections.”
    If I hadn’t been so pressed for time, I would have laughed. As it was, all I did was hoist my lower lip over my upper so that the impatient sigh I exhaled traveled north of the phone’s mike. “Lisa, I’m really sorry but I’m in a huge rush to get out. Can I speak to you late tomorrow or—”
    “Trust me,” she squeaked, at which I did have to smile: within a few days after first meeting her, I’d realized the words Lisa and truth did not belong on the same page. “Your friends at CNN or wherever will owe you forever when you give them this.”
    “I don’t know anybody at CNN. I don’t know anybody at any other news outlet either. Spy Guys is aired by what’s probably the most obscure cable network in the country. And my show isn’t just not-news. It’s unreality TV.” Trust me, I was tempted to tell her: Spy Guys was a fluffy forty-seven minutes for viewers who enjoyed being willfully ignorant about the actual doings of the Central Intelligence Agency.
    “What about your husband?” she asked.
    “My husband has nothing to do with the media.”
    “Katie, I know Adam. I thought he might have a friend or something. It is still Adam, isn’t it?”
    “Yes, it’s still Adam.”
    “Well then, remember when we were all in Washington? We were friends. How could I not know Adam?” The extent of her friendship with Adam, as I vaguely recalled, was when we once ran into her at a coffee place. She’d sat with us for the length of time it takes to sip a cappuccino.
    “Anyway,” I went on, “he’s a pathologist at the Bronx Zoo. That isn’t a job that puts someone in the media loop. I