A Secret About a Secret Read online

  Also by Peter Spiegelman

  Black Maps

  Death’s Little Helpers

  Red Cat

  Thick as Thieves

  Dr. Knox

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2022 by Peter Spiegelman

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Spiegelman, Peter, author.

  Title: A secret about a secret / Peter Spiegelman.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2022. | “This is a Borzoi book”—Title page verso.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021056371 (print) | LCCN 2021056372 (ebook) | ISBN 9780307961297 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780307961303 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.

  Classification: LCC PS3619.P543 S43 2022 (print) | LCC PS3619.P543 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20211118

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021056371

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021056372

  Ebook ISBN 9780307961303

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover images: (woods) Silas Manhood / Arcangel Images; (keyhole) Imagine CG Images; (sky) Honza Krej; (building) FenlioQ, all Shutterstock

  Cover design by Ervin Serrano

  ep_prh_6.0_140173256_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Peter Spiegelman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One: Saturday Evening

  Chapter Two: Saturday Evening

  Chapter Three: Saturday Evening

  Chapter Four: Saturday Night–Sunday Early Morning

  Chapter Five: Sunday Early Morning

  Chapter Six: Sunday Morning

  Chapter Seven: Sunday Morning

  Chapter Eight: Sunday Evening

  Chapter Nine: Monday Morning

  Chapter Ten: Monday Morning

  Chapter Eleven: Monday Afternoon

  Chapter Twelve: Monday Afternoon

  Chapter Thirteen: Monday Evening

  Chapter Fourteen: Tuesday Midday

  Chapter Fifteen: Tuesday Evening

  Chapter Sixteen: Wednesday Afternoon

  Chapter Seventeen: Wednesday Afternoon

  Chapter Eighteen: Wednesday Afternoon

  Chapter Nineteen: Wednesday Evening

  Chapter Twenty: Wednesday Evening

  Chapter Twenty-one: Wednesday Night

  Chapter Twenty-two: Thursday Morning

  Chapter Twenty-three: Thursday Afternoon

  Chapter Twenty-four: Thursday Afternoon

  Chapter Twenty-five: Thursday Evening

  Chapter Twenty-six: Friday Morning

  Chapter Twenty-seven: Friday Afternoon

  Chapter Twenty-eight: Friday Afternoon

  Chapter Twenty-nine: Friday Evening

  Chapter Thirty: Friday Night

  Chapter Thirty-one: Saturday Morning

  Chapter Thirty-two: Saturday Morning

  Chapter Thirty-three: Saturday Afternoon

  Chapter Thirty-four: Saturday Evening

  Chapter Thirty-five: Saturday Night

  Chapter Thirty-six: Saturday Night–Sunday Morning

  Chapter Thirty-seven: Sunday Morning

  Chapter Thirty-eight: Sunday Afternoon

  Chapter Thirty-nine: Sunday Night

  Chapter Forty: Monday Morning

  Chapter Forty-one: Monday Afternoon

  Chapter Forty-two: Monday Night

  Chapter Forty-three: Tuesday Morning

  Chapter Forty-four: Tuesday Afternoon

  Chapter Forty-five: Tuesday Evening

  Chapter Forty-six: Tuesday Night

  Chapter Forty-seven: Tuesday Night

  Chapter Forty-eight: Wednesday Morning

  Chapter Forty-nine: Wednesday Afternoon

  Chapter Fifty: Wednesday Night

  Chapter Fifty-one: Thursday Morning–Night

  Chapter Fifty-two: Friday Morning

  Chapter Fifty-three: Friday Morning

  Chapter Fifty-four: Friday Morning

  Chapter Fifty-five: Friday Morning

  Chapter Fifty-six: Friday Afternoon

  Chapter Fifty-seven: Friday Afternoon

  Chapter Fifty-eight: Two Weeks Later

  Chapter Fifty-nine: Two Weeks Later

  Epilogue: Tuesday Evening

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  For Sonny

  A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.

  —Diane Arbus

  CHAPTER ONE

  Saturday Evening

  The road was long and secret: a tunnel of trees that leaned overhead and wept like mourners in the wind. It ran beneath iron skies, past vacant fields and the lichen-crusted stones of ragged walls. It ran past a farmhouse, dark and empty, and through a stone village with few lit windows and no signs that named it. It ran on then towards the coast, and even in the hermetic car I smelled salt and rotting seaweed.

  My driver had excellent posture, a glossy brown ponytail, and perfect silence. I trusted that she knew our destination—what else could I do?—though she had shared nothing about it with me, instead maintaining a near-statuary stillness as she drove. Nor had I any idea of why I’d been dispatched. To examine, to investigate, to discover, to take a confession, to punish, or simply to bear witness? I was authorized to do all of these, though I wondered lately about my qualifications for any of them. If nostalgia was called for perhaps, or distraction, equivocation, worry, longing, or bone weariness, then I might be useful. But in all these years, my masters had never sought such things from me, and I didn’t think this Saturday in March would be the first time.

  The rear seat was deep and enveloping, the doors were distant, and the windows were tinted. Between the tidal sway of the car’s suspension and the thrum of pavement rolling away, I lapsed into a sort of fugue. It was not quite sleep, yet not quite dreamless—an unmooring, a drifting, and as I drifted, I crossed a frontier. There was no razor wire or striped barricade, no skeptical guards or surly dogs, no customs shed for stammered declarations, but a border nonetheless. When I came around, on the far side, it was to another world.

  To an uncertain season, neither winter nor spring, under dark, colliding skies—the clouds swollen and malign, obedient to no known physics. To a fading sun pinned wrong in the heavens, casting shadows too long, too dark, and irreconcilable with their antecedent objects. To birds hurtling wildly—careening, tumbling, shedding feathers like confetti, as if they’d been shot from a circus cannon. It was a
s if the planet had been knocked from its axis, jarred fifteen degrees from true—and not just the planet.

  The city, so many miles behind me, seemed even more distant now—a dying ember in my memory. My life there, even my Saturday morning, seemed suddenly remote and abstract—barely a pantomime. The people on my street and in the metro, in the shops and cafés, were like figures in an ancient film—silent, stiff-limbed silhouettes, thinner than smoke. The grocer, the sour man at the newsstand, my garrulous neighbor—it seemed any breeze could take them all into this alien sky. I might’ve been away from the city for minutes or hours or for a year or more—I had no idea, or any notion of what I’d find when I returned. If I returned. I shuddered and rubbed my eyes, but the feelings of dislocation, strangeness, and dread persisted. It was almost dark when we arrived.

  The great house was behind stone pillars and iron gates, down a brick drive bordered with pollarded trees and boxwoods still in burlap, and with brown lawns rolling away. The drive ran for half a mile and rose steeply at the end, to where the house loomed above the sea.

  It was an ancient pile of ginger-colored stone, with a massive central section and two long wings that reached towards me. Scrolled and fluted stonework framed dark windows, and stone birds brooded beneath the eaves of a copper roof. The wings embraced a brick forecourt with a fountain in the middle, in gray stone that had fared poorly in the salt air. Its figures were blurred and blunted, and in the failing light I couldn’t tell if the squat shapes spouting water were fish or frogs or demons, or if the male form they aimed at was bearing the world or heaving against a boulder. In either case, a thankless job.

  The car swept around the court and stopped beneath a columned porte cochere. The driver remained still and mute behind the wheel but unlocked the rear doors. I’d barely wrestled my bag and briefcase to the bricks when she drove off again. The evening air was cold and briny, and a swirling wind raised funnels of stone dust and dry leaves. Beneath the lapping of the fountain and the sound of the receding car I could hear the heavy, restless shift of the sea.

  Lights came on in the porte cochere, and one of the massive double doors swung back. A young woman stood there, small in the yawning doorway. She was slender and pale, in black boots, a gray skirt, and a black jacket with a mandarin collar. Her straight blond hair was parted in the middle and bound in a braid that hung over her left shoulder like the business end of a riding crop. Her white hands curled into fists, her lips made a skeptical line, and her large gray eyes narrowed. She looked at me for a long time—my battered luggage, my dark suit and coat, creased from the journey, my creased face and dark hair, tangled by the wind—before she spoke.

  “You’re from Security?” she asked. Her speech was precise, her voice low and controlled, as if it was perilous to give it rein.

  “Yes,” I said. “The Division of Security Standards—Standard Division.”

  “You have identification?” I drew ID from a breast pocket and handed her the case. She flipped it open, studied it, studied me, and flipped it shut. “Agent Myles,” she said, and returned my ID.

  “ ‘Myles’ will do.”

  “Why is it ‘Standard Division’? Why don’t you call it ‘Standards Division’?”

  I looked at her and shrugged. “Even we cannot control how the vernacular develops.”

  The woman shook her head. “We expected you earlier.”

  “It’s a long drive.”

  “The cafeteria is this way,” she said.

  “There’s no need, I’m not hungry.”

  She tilted her head at me as if I’d spoken in tongues. “The cafeteria is where we found the body,” she said, and beckoned me on.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Saturday Evening

  She introduced herself as Nadia Blom as she led me in, and told me she was assistant to Piers Witmer, the director of trials at Ondstrand Biologic and one of the company’s founders. She walked the way she spoke, with precision and control, and her boot heels were like tack hammers.

  We crossed a broad lobby, where the ginger stone walls and floor had been honed and polished to a glossy amber. The space was lit by a vast chandelier—a glowing nebula of interlaced bronze filaments. Nadia Blom’s reflection as she proceeded was like the prow of a yacht on a golden sea. We stopped at a long stone counter emblazoned with the company’s logo—an OB monogram in navy on a scarlet shield. There was a uniformed guard there, with white hair and a drinker’s nose, minding a bank of security barriers. He sat up as Nadia approached. She pulled two plastic cards from a pocket and handed me one that read Visitor. She pressed her own card to a scanner, and a barrier slid back.

  “After you,” she said. “You can leave your bag. You’ll get a photo pass when we determine what access you require.”

  I set my bag down, and the guard eyed it suspiciously. “As a rule, I require it all,” I said. “Access to everything.”

  She only just suppressed a laugh. “No visitor gets that,” she said, and walked down a corridor to an elevator bank.

  I shrugged. “Have you encountered Standard Division before?” I asked.

  “Until this morning, I didn’t know it existed.”

  I nodded and followed her onto an elevator. The car was paneled in frosted glass. She pressed 0. “It’s the staff cafeteria,” she said as we descended.

  “You found the body this morning?” I asked.

  “I didn’t find it, but, yes, it was found this morning. Don’t you know this? Dr. Witmer and Dr. Hasp were on for hours with you people.”

  The elevator doors opened to a white corridor with gray vinyl flooring, and I followed Nadia Blom out and to the left. Ceiling lights shuddered to life as we advanced.

  “Who is Dr. Hasp?” I asked.

  She stopped short and turned, squinting at me. “Who is…? He’s the head of Ondstrand—our chief science officer and CEO. He’s one of our founders, along with Dr. Muir and Dr. Witmer—really the founder. How can you not know that? They were on for hours.”

  “They were not on for hours with me.”

  “Don’t your people tell you anything? Don’t they brief you?”

  “As a rule, they find it’s best if I hear things for myself. They believe less mediation means less bias introduced. My experience is that bias finds a way. Nevertheless…”

  Lines appeared across her brow. “So what do you know?”

  “About your company and what you do here: nothing. About the circumstances that led Dr. Witmer and Dr. Hasp to call on us today: also nothing.”

  Nadia Blom’s mouth opened, but for a while no words came out. “Nothing at all? Nothing? Then what good are you?”

  “A question I ask myself often. That said, if you’d care to relieve a bit of my ignorance, I might manage something productive. Or at least manage to keep busy.”

  She looked up and down the blank corridor, empty behind us, and still dark ahead. She sighed and crossed her arms and almost smiled again. “Your ignorance seems so comprehensive—which bit shall I relieve first?”

  “Let’s begin with you. How long have you worked here?”

  She squinted. “Me? I joined two years ago.”

  “Joined from university?”

  The squint became a frown. “From a graduate program. Dr. Hasp hired me.”

  “A graduate program in biology? Chemistry?”

  “Business administration. My undergraduate degree is biochemistry.”

  “But you didn’t continue with that. Why not?”

  A scowl replaced the frown. “How is this relevant, Agent Myles? How does this possibly—”

  “ ‘Myles’ will do, Ms. Blom. Were you no good at biochemistry? Did you lose interest in it? Was the pay not sufficient?”

  She leaned back. “I…I suppose it was all of the above. I realized that I was no better than good enough at the science, and that good enough was goi
ng to lead me into teaching, or something equally dull. I realized that the science itself was less interesting to me than how the science made its way in the world—the forces that directed that—the market forces. And, yes, I decided I wanted to make some money.”

  I nodded. “And Ondstrand Biologic fits the bill? You’ve not been disappointed?”

  She uncrossed her arms and stood even more erect. “Not at all.”

  “No? Despite the fact that Dr. Hasp recruited you, yet two years later you don’t work for him—not directly—but instead report to his subordinate. I assume that Dr. Witmer is his subordinate.”

  The frown returned, deeper than before, and pink patches rose on her cheeks, and on her neck above her collar. “Honestly, this is ridiculous—I don’t see how my employment history or job satisfaction can possibly be relevant to the body we found in our cafeteria. But, for your information, Agent Myles: my employment with Ondstrand has entailed a rotation through all of the firm’s operating areas—a program designed for me by Dr. Hasp himself, who has mentored me from my first day, and to whom I’ve always had a reporting line. So, no—I’ve never been disappointed here, the past ten minutes notwithstanding.”

  I nodded. “Are you his spy, then?”