“No, not at all. It’s just that—”
“Is that why you never confide in me about, like, anything?”
“That’s not true.”
Or no more true than it had been for my own father. It then struck me that the children of divorce were the original double agents—faithful to two masters at once, yet almost certainly favoring one over the other in secret.
“David, I hope you realize how much I’ve always regretted that you grew up with only one parent in the house. I know it was never easy. For you or your mother.”
“You grew up that way. You seem to have turned out okay.”
“True. But death didn’t give my mother much choice.” I’d never told him that she ran out on us. “My exile was voluntary, and stupid.”
“You wish you’d stayed together?”
“I wish I’d been mature enough at the time to at least give it a try.”
“That’s pretty much what Mom says.”
Which didn’t make me feel any better. Even after sixteen years the judgment stung, mostly because it was true.
David forked in a mouthful of steak and followed it with potatoes. At least one of us still had an appetite. He was right. I’d never offered him much in the way of personal revelation, but maybe tonight was a start.
I glanced again toward the table by the door. A busboy was clearing the dishes. She’d left behind her magazine, and when the busboy picked it up I looked at David and he looked at me.
It was an old copy of Life, with Joseph Stalin on the cover.
6
This was not the Vienna I’d known as a boy. Riding the S-Bahn into the city I sat among Turks and Arabs, their chatter clouding the air like gnats. When the Turks got off, Bosnians got on. Orange commuter straps swayed overhead like hangman’s nooses, and as usual after a transatlantic flight I felt like the walking dead.
Out in the streets, police cameras stared from every corner. A tram line I’d once used no longer existed. When I went in search of coffee to help me recalibrate—the signature drink of Viennese living—the first place I saw was a damn Starbucks. Still, it was caffeine, and after a few swallows my outlook improved.
Some things hadn’t changed. Pedestrians at crosswalks still waited dutifully for the light, and old women still glared when I crossed anyway, the embassy boy back to his old tricks. In the clipped green expanses of the Stadtpark, grown men still peed behind the sparsest of cover, a habit that now seems reasonable with public toilets charging a euro. This being a Sunday, practically everything was geschlossen, just as it would have been thirty-five years ago.
Most reassuring of all was Vienna’s enduring beauty—block after block, stacked and frosted like a wedding cake. Yet, to my more experienced (jaded?) eye, the imperial magnificence looked brittle—as if the city’s aging face had received an injection of Botox and could no longer crack a smile.
My dad was a late riser on Sundays, so I’d told him my flight was getting in hours later than it really was, meaning I had a few hours to kill before arriving on his doorstep. He’d been oddly thrown by the idea of a visit on such short notice.
“Day after tomorrow? Goodness. Well, I’ll have to do some juggling, but yes, of course, Sunday would be perfect! I’ll reserve a table at Figlmüller, and to hell with the tourists. A schnitzel and a Gösser will have you feeling right at home.”
Juggling? Was I that hard to prepare for?
I set out on a long walk, part of my usual plan for beating jet lag by avoiding naps at all costs. It was cloudy and cool, and I kept an eye out for tails, especially slender women with red flowers or leashed Alsatians. So far, only the cameras were watching.
Shortly after one-thirty I reached my dad’s stately old building, a block off the Graben in the Hofburg quarter. I pressed the button by his name, shoved open the door on his answering buzz, then rode the tiny caged elevator to five. He was waiting in the hall dressed in his usual Sunday uniform of tan corduroys and a blue Oxford.
“The prodigal returns!” His stock greeting. “Let me take your bag, you must be exhausted.”
He had laid on quite a spread. On the dining room table was a beaded pitcher of orange juice next to a carafe of coffee. Slices of meat and cheese were arrayed like playing cards on a china platter alongside a basket of croissants and bowls of yogurt, muesli, and sliced fruit. A full Vienna Frühstuck, even at this hour, and the gesture was touching. It reminded me of how anxious I’d been to please David two days earlier, and I wondered if parents ever stopped feeling as if they needed to launch a charm offensive whenever their grown children came home.
“I hope you’re hungry, or would you like a lie-down first?” Using the British term.
“I’ll eat. It looks great. Then a shower, maybe. But I need to stay vertical.”
“Of course. Your stoical approach to jet lag. Here, let’s take your plate to the living room where it’s not so damn gloomy. I’ll bring the coffee.”
He drew open the blinds to a view of old rooftops beneath brooding clouds.
“A cross-country sky,” he said. “Isn’t that what you used to call days like this?”
“I did. Looks like one of those days when our coach would run us ten miles through the Vienna woods.”
I could smell the trail as I said it—black mud and fallen leaves. Dad had come to all my races, screaming with surprising passion for a sport he’d never known. I think he appreciated its perfect meritocracy. No manner of favoritism or fakery could make you finish even a second faster. To a diplomat, that must have seemed miraculous.
“Reading anything good?”
His favorite question, and with the perfect backdrop. Bookshelves lined the two walls that got the least sunlight, so the bindings wouldn’t fade. The espionage first editions were on the far left, easy to spot by the shiny plastic covers over the dust jackets, the mark of a collector, although he’d read every copy at least twice. Dad certainly wouldn’t have needed hours to remember Tommy Hambledon, and it again occurred to me that he might be playing at least an advisory role for my mysterious controller.
“Funny you should ask,” I said. “I’ve been going through some old Lemasters.”
“You make it sound more like business than pleasure.”
“In a way, it is.”
“How so?”
“Are you sure you don’t already know?”
He frowned, puzzled. It seemed genuine.
“I’m here on a freelance assignment. Trying to ease back into a little journalism.”
“Wonderful!” He’d hated it when I gave up writing, and he almost never asked about my work at Ealing Wharton. “What’s the story?”
“Something you might be able to help me with. Vanity Fair wants a piece on the espionage career of Edwin Lemaster. That’s why I’ve been going through the books. Searching for clues to what he was really up to.”
Dad wrinkled his nose.
“Who put you on to this?”
The one question I didn’t want to answer. Dad was as sharp as ever.
“I got a tip in the mail. Anonymous.”
“The most reckless kind, for all concerned. Didn’t you take a big enough bite out of him the first time?”
“You act like that was my fault.”
He shrugged. I sipped coffee, waiting to see if he’d take sides. Maybe he already had.
“You know, I came across a review a few years ago that dated his entire decline as a novelist to that interview of yours.”
“Never saw it.”
But I had, of course, and one particular paragraph had lodged in my mind:
Ever since his “confession,” Lemaster has lost his edge, seemingly more interested in proving his loyalty than in honing his craft. His latest book, a techno-thriller in which Uncle Sam’s minions are portrayed only in the brightest hues of red, white and blue, completes his descent into mediocrity.
“The funny thing,” Dad said, “is that Agency people didn’t even raise an eyebrow about the whole conf
essional part.”
“Really?”
“It was his other slip that pissed them off.”
“There was another slip?”
“Think about it. Think of everything he told you.”
I did. I drew a blank until my father filled it in.
“ ‘I was keeping an eye out for the Don Tollesons of this world.’ He was a mole hunter.”
“Well, yeah. That was pretty obvious.”
“And what does that tell you about who he worked for?”
“The Soviet desk?”
“Oh, come on.”
“Jim Angleton?” My father smiled but said nothing. “I didn’t think Counterintelligence had its own field men. Not overseas, anyway.”
“Nobody else thought so, either, including most of the CIA.”
“So it was off the books?”
“Everyone’s except Angleton’s, which he kept in a safe.”
Angleton yet again. Dead for more than twenty years, yet still coming up in my memories, and in my conversations with both David and Dad. And why not? Everything I’d ever read about him made him sound like the bizarre creation of some novelist, which of course made him seem real, eternal. He was the original Cold Warrior, one of the first to play the postwar game against the Soviets and play it well. In his hobbies, as in his work, he was a detail man, a miniaturist—tying flies, breeding orchids, combing files, hunting moles, deconstructing poems. Deeply suspicious, yet blinded by Anglophilia and his friendship with Kim Philby, whose betrayal drove him over the edge. And now I’d learned that Ed Lemaster had secretly worked for him.
“Turns out,” Dad continued, “that Angleton had three operatives, all of them ostensibly employed by the Soviet desk but in reality reporting to him. Which meant they were paid twice, of course.”
“So even within the Agency there were double agents, sort of.”
“That’s certainly how the Soviet desk saw it. Angleton called them his ‘flying squad.’ Apparently only a few of his assistants knew about it.”
“Where’d you hear all this, the funeral?” He smiled cagily. “No wonder I couldn’t get anything out of you at dinner.”
“Of course, by the time Lemaster let the cat out of the bag in that interview, Angleton had been in retirement eleven years. But there was still hell to pay. You saw what those people were like. They still argue about crap that happened in 1948, so you can imagine what kind of a row they’d have over—”
He was interrupted by a ringing telephone, a land line jangling down the hall in his bedroom. It startled us both, but him even more. He looked over at the clock on an end table, then back at me, then again at the clock, which seemed strange, but I said nothing. It was exactly two o’clock.
The phone continued to ring.
“Excuse me,” he said, sounding shaken. He headed off toward his bedroom. I took up a position at the end of the hall to listen.
“Cage,” he said, answering in the Austrian style. There was a pause. Then, sternly and in German: “No. This is Warfield, but William is here. Are you sure that’s who you wish to speak to? Very well.”
Then, louder and in English: “Bill, it’s for you.”
His brow was creased as he handed me the receiver. He hovered in the doorway as I answered, rude by his standards.
“This is William Cage.”
I turned my back for privacy, but sensed his lingering presence. I’d been back for half an hour and we were already spying on each other. The answering voice was neither tense nor urgent. It was an older man, Viennese accent. The line was clear, so the call was probably local.
“This is Christoph, at Kurzmann Buchladen.” A bookstore. “I have your special order, delivered today in the name of Dewey.”
There it was, the promised message, although I hadn’t expected it so soon.
“A delivery? Now?”
“We are closed Sunday. We open tomorrow at eight o’clock. On Johannesgasse.”
“Where did you—?”
He’d hung up. When I turned around my father was staring from the doorway.
“Was that Kurzmann’s?”
“How’d you know?”
“I’m an old customer, although not for years. Did you special-order something?”
“No.”
I toyed with trying the name “Dewey” on him, but if I told him that, then I would have to explain more than I was ready to. His reaction to the phone call had already aroused my suspicion, and, judging from what he said next, my reaction had aroused his.
“Do they have something for you?”
“So he said.”
“And you’re sure you didn’t order anything? You’re positive that that call came from completely out of the blue?”
“Yes.”
He eyed me dubiously, probably because of the guilty look on my face. But he was hiding something, too. We moved back to the living room and, like boxers returning to the ring, took up our previous positions. Then, for whatever reason—the strange call, the jet lag, or even the sight of all those spy novels, these words spilled from my mouth:
“This is almost like something out of a Lemaster novel, don’t you think?”
He reacted as if I’d slapped him.
“Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because it is? Do you remember any scenes like this? Or could I be thinking of another author?”
“All right, Bill. Enough.” His tone was stern, as if I was in high school again and he’d just found a roach clip in the bathroom. “Who told you to ask me these questions?”
“Nobody.”
“Likely story, but I suppose after that wacky funeral nothing should surprise me. I did wonder what sort of repercussions would come out of that unholy mix of people, but I never imagined you’d be part of them. So, who did you speak to before flying over here? Someone at State? Or maybe even the Agency?”
“The CIA?” I didn’t have to fake sounding incredulous because I really was.
“So the Agency, then. Is that the real reason you’re here?”
“Dad, no one told me to ask you anything.” He gave me a long look, unconvinced. I stared right back. “Have I ever been able to lie to your face and get away with it?”
“No.” He seemed to relax. “But something made you ask.”
“My imagination, probably. Why’d you assume I’d been talking to the Agency?”
“Ask Christoph.”
“The bookseller?”
“When you pick up the delivery. Ask him why I’d think this was some sort of job for the Agency. Ask him as well who else has been in touch with him on this matter, and for God’s sake do it discreetly. Then tell me what he says.”
“You’re serious?”
“Absolutely. And, son?”
“Yes?”
“If you’re thinking this is some sort of lark, or intellectual exercise, then I urge you to disabuse yourself of that notion straightaway.”
“Based on what?”
“That’s all I’m going to say until you’ve talked to Christoph.”
At first I thought he was bluffing, but as the silence lengthened, Dad stared out the window into the gray afternoon. I coughed and picked up my coffee cup, but it was empty, so I set it back down, uncertain what to do next. We still had five hours to kill before dinner, eighteen before the bookstore opened. It was going to be a long and awkward afternoon.
7
I arrived five minutes early, only to find that Kurzmann Buchladen was already open for business. There was even a customer ahead of me, a dissipated-looking fellow in a long wool coat and a floppy brown hat that slouched on his head like a dumpling. I took him at first for a wino, then noticed how assiduously he was working the shelves, like an ingenious piece of farm machinery that can simultaneously harrow, weed, and cultivate. Three volumes were tucked beneath his left arm and a fourth bulged from a coat pocket. He looked up as the door shut behind me, jingling a bell. Then he wrote me off as inconsequential and resumed his
harvesting.
I looked around. Sellers of rare and antiquarian books are often messy housekeepers, but even by those standards the conditions at Kurzmann’s were unforgivable. The framed prints and maps hanging from the walls were dusty and crooked. Several had cracked glass. The watermarked ceiling was beaded with moisture—a death sentence for all that cloth and pulp below—and the musty air smelled faintly of cat urine. Mounted on the wall behind the register was an ancient color engraving of Prince Metternich, Europe’s original celebrity power broker, the Kissinger of his day. He glared out at the merchandise in apparent disdain.
Creaking floorboards drew my attention toward the back, where a short balding man in an unbuttoned vest emerged from the gloom. A tape measure was draped around his neck, as if he were a tailor who’d been called away from his sewing.
“Yes?” he asked in English, pegging my nationality. He ignored the other customer, and looked surprised by my presence, which was odd given yesterday’s phone call.
“Are you Christoph?” I asked in German. He answered in the same language.
“Do I know you?”
“You telephoned yesterday about a special order. I’m Bill Cage.”
A book slapped to the floor in the aisle where the other man was browsing. He snatched up the dropped copy and glanced my way with a gleam in his eye, or maybe I imagined it. The only noise was the muffled sound of rush hour traffic from the Ring, half a block away.
“Ah, yes,” Christoph said. He shuffled toward the register. “Your book has arrived.”
“For someone named Dewey, you said.”
He shot me a sidelong glance but said nothing.
“Well, is it or not?”
Stopping behind the counter, he glanced toward the harvester, who was working at a more deliberate pace than before. Then he glared at me and hissed beneath his breath: “Do you always conduct your business so sloppily?”
He quickly turned away and, with some effort, climbed a stepladder to a long shelf stuffed with books. Yellow labels scribbled with names poked from every copy, although the amount of dust suggested that most of the customers had either died or forgotten their orders. But my parcel looked clean as a whistle when he pulled it free. It was wrapped in brown butcher paper and tied with a crisscross of white string. Something about this presentation stirred a distant memory that I couldn’t quite place. The name “Dewey” was written on the butcher paper in black ink. Christoph handed it over, still glaring.
The Double Game Page 5