“Hand me the papers, please. Put them on the ground in front of you and back away.”
Szondi kept his distance, which was a bad sign. I held on to the papers.
“Put the book down first,” I said. “You can slide it over to me.”
“And then find out later that the papers are fake? Even if they’re real, how do I know you haven’t made copies? We’ll have to search your room, of course.”
“Then why don’t I take you there now?”
“We know where you’re staying. I’m sure we’ll be able to find the key after we’re finished here.”
Szondi smiled as the import of his words sank in. The thug on the left leveled his gun at me. I rose on the balls of my feet to make a dive for it, and was about to answer when a woman’s voice barked an order from somewhere out in the open—an order that made both thugs freeze. I lost my balance, dropping to my knees on a slurry of wet newspapers and broken bottles, then scrambled to my feet just as Litzi stepped into the opening behind Béla Szondi.
She said something more. This time the thugs dropped their guns, which she kicked out of the way. They backed up a few steps and put their hands on their heads. Her next words were in English.
“Come out of there, Bill.”
“Gladly.” By now my heart was going a hundred beats per second, but I still had enough of my wits about me to remember what I’d come for.
“Tell Béla to give me the book.”
This brought a sneer from Szondi, who seemed far less intimidated than his hired hands.
“You cannot speak to me directly, Mr. Cage? You let a woman do your talking for you?”
“Drop the book,” I said. “Then back away.”
He opened his hand. The book came open as it fell, pages fluttering, and landed facedown in the muck. Even under the circumstances I couldn’t help but wince.
I stepped over toward Szondi to retrieve it.
“Wait!” Litzi said.
Too late.
Szondi pulled a gun, and now I was directly in his line of fire, and shielding him from Litzi. But even as the barrel rose level with my stomach, a wonderful thing happened. Instantaneously, with barely time for a thought, I reacted just as I’d been taught to on that long-ago afternoon when I took the executive survival course, courtesy of Marty Ealing.
My move was from “Lesson Three: Disarming an Attacker.” My left hand shoved aside the barrel while my right clamped his forearm and twisted it until he cried out in pain and opened his fingers. The gun fell, right on top of the book, and I shoved Szondi onto his ass into the filthy muck. I grabbed the book, then the gun, and backed away.
The two thugs, apparently far smarter than their boss, hadn’t moved a muscle.
“Nicely done,” Litzi said. She looked even more surprised than me. Then she pulled a roll of duct tape from her shoulder bag and tossed it to me.
“Tape those two to that pole by the entrance, back-to-back,” she said.
She motioned the thugs into position, and they seemed in no mood to test her resolve. My hands were shaking as I started unpeeling the tape. Had I really just done that? As I taped the men into place I glanced at Litzi. I’d never seen this look in her eyes—neither rage nor menace; instead, a cold resolve. If either thug had even wiggled a toe, I’m positive she would have shot him. And where had she gotten a gun? Being someone who generally doesn’t know a Glock from a glockenspiel, I couldn’t have told you its make and model. But it was compact and tidy, and black as the night. It fit so comfortably in her hand that it might have been made especially for her.
I kept pulling the tape free with a ripping sound, then wound it around the thugs’ arms and midsections, pinning them together back-to-back with the pole in between, seven loops in all.
“Get up,” she said to Szondi. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”
I then taped Szondi to another pole, eight loops for him.
“That’s enough,” she said. “They’ll be able to get out soon enough, or else someone will hear them down here. But by then we’ll be gone.” Then she spoke one last time to Szondi.
“If you try to have us followed, these documents will be in tomorrow’s newspaper. A reporter I know is already standing by with copies, and if he doesn’t have an all-clear from me by six o’clock then he’s going to print them. Understood?”
He nodded. No more smiles.
Then we left. Just like that. Me and my trusty old girlfriend, who I’d once fancied needed my protection from the bad old East German Volkspolizei. The quiet archivist, my Marian the Librarian with nice legs, sensible glasses, and the maudlin backstory of an expired biological clock. The woman who, when she was seventeen, had been too timid even to do a decent job of spying on my father, yet she had apparently been in league with my handler from the beginning.
But under the circumstances, how could I be anything other than ecstatic to see her, even though she was packing heat and speaking the local language like a native? I kept glancing at her as we briskly descended the stairway toward the river, but she looked straight ahead, as businesslike as ever. By the time we reached the bottom my pulse had nearly returned to normal, and the evaporating sweat on my back was prickling like dried seawater. Glancing over my shoulder, and seeing no one in pursuit, I finally judged it safe to talk.
“I didn’t know you spoke Hungarian.”
“I don’t. I practiced three phrases: ‘Drop your weapon.’ ‘Hands on your head.’ ‘Don’t move or I’ll shoot.’ I’m not sure what I would have done if they’d talked back or resisted.”
“Shot them? That’s what they seemed to think.”
“It’s what they were supposed to think.”
“I get the idea you’ve done this before.”
She shook her head.
“Only in training.”
“For the Agency?”
“God, no!” She frowned at me.
“Austrian Intelligence? And please don’t say KGB.”
This at least got a laugh, a flash of the Litzi I thought I’d always known.
“The Verfassungsschutz. The federal internal security police, but it was ages ago. I’m an archivist now, well and truly. Professionally, I don’t even live in this century anymore, or even the last one.”
“An archivist with a gun?”
“On special loan. At midnight tonight it turns back into a pumpkin.”
We headed for the bridge, blending back into the flow of pedestrians and bicycles.
“Is that all you’re going to tell me?”
“What more do you want to know?”
“All of it, if you don’t mind.”
“Saving your skin isn’t enough?”
“No.”
She smiled again. Every time she did, I inched a little closer to being able to see how these two Litzis might actually coexist. It wasn’t as if she’d become this way overnight. We’d been apart for thirty-seven years. No doubt she had changed in all sorts of ways. Up to now my view of her had been clouded by nostalgia. Now I finally beheld her as she really was, a woman of experience, a woman with a past.
“I was only in for three years,” she said. “They recruited me during my last year at university. Since then, I’ve only done the odd errand here and there, a few favors during manpower shortages. But never anything serious, and nothing even close to dangerous.”
“So you were, what, twenty when you volunteered?”
“Twenty-one, and I didn’t volunteer. They approached me. Apparently they got my name from someone at your embassy.”
“Dad was no longer in Vienna by then.”
“I’m not saying it was your father. But they knew all about our little trip and how I’d been threatened by the Vopos and, by implication, the Soviets. Knew it right down to the name of the little town where they pulled us off the train.”
She stared at me longer than necessary as we moved onto the bridge, to the point where I almost felt compelled to deny any involvement. Then she looked straight
ahead and resumed her account.
“They told me they could ensure that nothing like that would ever happen to me or my family again. No more threats. But first they needed my help against ‘those kinds of people.’ ”
“Russians, or East Germans?”
“Leftists in general. More to the point, the RAF.”
The Red Army Faction, she meant, the organization of ultra-left, ultra-violent young people—half of them female, oddly enough—who had operated in Germany from the late sixties to the turn of the millennium. Known originally as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, its members had been implicated in shootings, bombings, kidnappings, and robberies, a reign of terror across three decades that peaked in 1977 with a string of abductions known as the “German Autumn.”
“I thought the RAF was strictly German?”
“It was, but in late seventy-seven they came into Vienna and kidnapped a millionaire on his doorstep, and I think the authorities went a little crazy. For a while they were convinced that every little bunch of campus lefties was going to metastasize into the next RAF cell, and that’s where I came in.”
“You were undercover?”
She nodded. “I was supposed to infiltrate them. Some ultra-left group at my university.”
“How did it go?”
“Fine, for a while. But it ended badly.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning, badly enough that they let me quit, then helped me find a job. They kept my involvement a secret. Even my husband never knew. To him I was just Litzi the sensible librarian.”
“I understand his point of view.”
She was quiet for a while as we negotiated the crowds on the bridge. I wondered what she meant by “ending badly.” In disgrace? Betrayal? Death? But by the time we’d crossed the Danube another question had occurred to me.
“Was this job—the one involving me—just another ‘little favor’ they asked you to do?”
She didn’t answer right away.
“As far as I know.”
“So that story you told me about the fat man in the seersucker, the character right out of Ambler, it never happened?”
“They told me to tell you that. I had no idea why until you showed me the description in the book.”
“Did you know it was going to be me at the Bräunerhof?”
She shook her head emphatically.
“They had me tail you from your appointment earlier that morning at Kurzmann’s, the bookstore. A man with a brown paper parcel—that’s the only description they gave me. I was supposed to keep my distance until the rendezvous, and I wasn’t close enough to recognize you until you came out of the phone booth. Obviously they had good reason to pick me, but I’m sure they wanted my surprise to be genuine.”
“It definitely fooled me.”
“I wasn’t trying to fool you. Not about that. I was thrilled to see you, but I hated the idea of deceiving you. Hated it. That night after you left my apartment I sent word that I wanted out.”
Before we slept together, in other words. For some reason that mattered.
“They refused?”
“They said I could quit, but only if I stopped seeing you. I was supposed to be there to protect you, to watch your flanks.”
“And to report my movements.”
She shut her eyes, then nodded.
“Yes. That, too. And when I saw that the work was becoming dangerous, too dangerous for me to control, then I quit, in the hope that you would quit as well. But when you didn’t, well …”
“You continued following me?”
“Yes.”
“Under whose orders?”
“No one’s. I went AWOL. Threw away my phone, stopped checking in. I took certain measures in Prague to ensure I wouldn’t be followed, then came here on a bus. I guessed that you’d stop at Antikvárium Szondi, and that’s where I picked up your trail.”
“Where’d you get the gun?”
“An old contact. It’s like any other kind of business. Half of it is connections and calling in old favors. Even after people get out they always keep a hand in, whether they want to or not.”
“Like Breece Preston?”
“Yes, like him. The Hammerhead, too.”
“Why would the Verfassungsschutz be running this show?”
“I doubt they are. I’m just a resource they’re lending out. Like I said, connections and favors. I have no idea who your handler is, or who he works for, but obviously he has friends over here who still owe him.”
“So do you.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Vienna police, for one. It wasn’t my father’s connections that got us released, was it?”
“I made a call. Or asked them to make one. They did it because they recognized the number right away, and knew they would be in trouble if they ignored it.”
“Is that the same number you gave to those Czech cops, the other night in the rain?”
“Yes.”
“Handy.”
“You do what you have to. But today I was working for you only. And now I want you to quit. You’ve seen where it leads. Two people are dead and you would’ve been the third. We can change hotels, then leave on a bus in the morning. We’ll switch routes in some market town, then cross the border where they won’t expect us.”
“You really think the Szondis will try something?”
“They’re the least of your worries. Two other people, minimum, were following us in Prague, including the big American with, what did you call it?”
“A mullet. And I know they were. Lothar told me.”
“Lothar.” She rolled her eyes.
“I wouldn’t take him lightly. He’s had some of the same training you had.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“You don’t trust him?”
“How can I trust him when I don’t know who he’s working for?”
“You could say the same about yourself.”
That stopped her.
“You’re right. You could. Another good reason to quit. But fortunately you don’t have to. I took the liberty this morning of giving notice for you. By now your handler will have received word that we are off the case.”
“Took the liberty? That’s an understatement!” I stopped on the sidewalk, furious. We must have looked like an old married couple, quarreling in public. “I really do thank you for saving my ass, but I’d like to make my own decisions if you don’t mind.”
“Someday you’ll thank me. So will your son, and your father.”
“And Edwin Lemaster.”
“What of it? Do you even know him? Much less know what he really did or didn’t do for his country?”
“Or some other country.”
“Some other country that no longer exists. If anyone knows the emptiness of actions carried out in the name of country, it’s me. Everything I ever did for a nation, or an agency, or for some bureaucratic overlord is ashes to me now.”
“You said it ended badly.”
“I also said this is not the time to discuss it. There are bigger questions. Like, did you ever stop to think that your handler—our handler—might be ex-KGB?”
“Lothar says otherwise. He worked for him, too.”
“Then maybe Lothar was also duped.”
It was a crazy idea, and probably a scare tactic. But the scariest thing was that it was possible. Another layer of that Greek pastry Lothar had talked about crumbled before my eyes. For all I knew, Lemaster might even be the one who was running me in circles, finally getting his revenge on the reporter whose ambush had brought on his decline. He certainly would have known that curiosity was my fatal weakness.
Maybe Litzi was right about quitting. At the very least, it was an opportune time to leave Budapest. We could return to Vienna, where her connections—and Dad’s—would offer the greatest protection. Then, with the Oppenheim book in hand, I could decide in relative tranquillity whether to continue.
“All right, then.”
“For now.”
“Let’s get your things. I’m registered at a more secure location. By this time tomorrow we’ll be back at your father’s.”
“And then?”
The question covered more ground than this spy chase of ours, and we both knew it.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “We’ll talk about it later. In complete honesty.”
“Did they train you on that as well?”
She didn’t care for the question. I hadn’t expected her to.
32
We settled into our new digs, a tiny inn that Litzi chose for its front and rear entrances and the desk clerk’s striking lack of curiosity. He requested neither passports nor true identities.
Her checklist apparently didn’t include cleanliness. The bedsheets smelled like the stairwell, and the bathroom looked like an art installation celebrating a century of rust. But after locking the rickety door I finally felt secure enough to get out Szondi’s copy of The Great Impersonation.
Author E. Phillips Oppenheim had never been a spy, although he worked for Britain’s Ministry of Information. Hardly anybody today has heard of him, even though in the 1920s he was famous on both sides of the Atlantic. He made the cover of Time magazine, and wrote more than a hundred novels. Yes, a hundred.
The Great Impersonation was probably the most popular, but by the time I tried to read it in the early seventies it was badly dated. I didn’t make it past the first chapter, mostly because the characters kept saying things like “By Jove!” and “Ripping of you, old chap!”
Now, as I flipped through the pages in search of a message, those “By Joves!” kept winking up at me. I found nothing in the text. Then I slid my fingers along the clothbound cover and peered down the spine for any sign of an inserted note. No success there, either. Maybe the courier network had used a book code and sent the key by separate channels. That would explain why Lemaster took it in stride when Szondi kept the book.
The Double Game Page 28