The Double Game

by Dan Fesperman

  “As a matter of fact,” Lemaster said slowly, “yes. I did contemplate it. Not for ideological reasons, of course. And certainly not for the money. But it crossed my mind, and do you know why?”

  I shook my head, not daring to speak. The revolving wheels of the recorder vibrated against my chest like a trapped bumblebee.

  “For the thrill of it. The challenge. To just walk through the looking glass and find out how they really lived on the other side—well, isn’t that the secret dream of every spy?”

  The words were barely out of his mouth when the chancellor rounded the corner from the men’s room, breaking the spell. Soon afterward the coffee arrived, and with it the first glimmers of the sobriety that would restore our previous distance. That night I slept deeply and dreamed for the first time in years of Cold War Vienna.

  The next morning, a bit hung over, I agonized over how to handle Lemaster’s little bombshell. No doubt my family connection had allowed me to maneuver into a position of trust. Alcohol had also played a role. And any man unaccustomed to giving interviews was certainly more prone to a lapse. But weren’t such factors part and parcel of effective interviewing? Didn’t readers of the Post deserve the truth? And hadn’t I succeeded where even Time magazine had failed?

  I was reminded of a Joan Didion line I’d read in college, something about how writing was always a matter of betrayal. That’s when I realized I couldn’t go through with it, not for something as ephemeral as a newspaper story. I felt immediate relief, albeit with a pang of disappointment, but my decision was made. I was too close to the story. I would keep the revelation to myself.

  Or such was my intention when Metro Editor Kent Spencer approached my desk an hour later to ask how the story was coming. I described my approach. His downturned mouth indicated he was less than impressed. So, as a teaser, or maybe just to show him what a diligent little questioner I’d been, I found myself saying, “You know, right toward the end of the evening he mentioned something pretty interesting.”

  Even as I told him I was calculating how to use the quote, after all, by sprinkling it into the final paragraphs. It would be an anecdote to unite the story’s major threads. A kicker, as we said in the business. That way I could provide the proper context—the drinks, the off-the-cuff mood, the devil’s advocate thrust of my question.

  But Spencer was a step ahead of me.

  “He said what? Are you telling me the author of The Double Game actually considered being a double agent? That’s a helluva story, Bill. I mean, it’s still kind of featury, but only if you go with a soft lead. Who knows? They might even want it out front.”

  My stomach rolled over. The dangerous animal I had just released from its cage paused to bare its teeth, then leaped beyond reach. I tried to catch it.

  “Really, Kent, it wasn’t like he was serious.”

  “C’mon, a quote like that? You got it on tape, I hope.”

  “Sure, but …” In my rush to chase down the beast I had just ensured its escape. If I’d told Spencer the remark wasn’t taped, I might have been able to downplay it, even bury it. Instead, my editor now knew it was not only usable but also lawyerproof.

  “Great! Lead with it.”

  “I was thinking more in terms of a kicker. It would make the perfect ending.”

  “What, then have some turnip on the desk cut the story from the bottom? It’s called news, Bill. It goes at the top.”

  So, with a dark sense of foreboding and, worse, of betrayal, I wrote a story saying that spy-turned-novelist Edwin Lemaster had once considered working for the Soviet Union. By the time Spencer and the copy desk finished with it, the tone was downright accusatory, and even my loudest protests couldn’t repair the damage.

  It was a brief sensation, of course. The wires picked it up before the ink was dry, and by noon one UPI version had even reported that Lemaster “nearly defected.”

  Lemaster never called, never wrote. He responded only through a press release in which, as I richly deserved, he condescendingly implied that a callow young hack had used an unguarded moment of tipsy speculation to fashion a mountain out of a molehill.

  But the strangest reaction may have been my father’s. He phoned our apartment even before April was out of bed. He lived in Paris then, one of his last diplomatic postings. In those pre-Internet days he must have spotted the item in the State Department’s daily press summary, and then gotten someone in Washington to read him the text.

  “Jesus, Bill, what have you done to our old legend Edwin Lemaster? You get him drunk or something?” His tone was strained, like he was trying to keep it light but not succeeding.

  “You’re the one with some explaining to do. How come you never told me you were friends?”

  There was a sharp intake of breath, followed by a pregnant pause. Then, in halting steps: “Did he … He told you that?”

  “Yes.”

  Another pause, the line crackling from across the Atlantic.

  “What else did he say about, well, all that?”

  “Hardly anything. Said you crossed paths a few times, that you were ‘a good soldier, a good Joe.’ Nothing specific. I would’ve thought you’d have mentioned it at least once.”

  “There were security reasons. And you …” He sighed, groping his way through the static. “You’d have thought I was name-dropping.”

  “Is that the best you can do?”

  I tried to sound offhand, hoping for a laugh, or for more. Dad is a nimble conversationalist, and this was his opening. But he held his ground, and when we hung up a few seconds later it felt as if a veil of secrecy had been lowered between us. Worse, maybe it had been there all along.

  But what I didn’t learn until recently was that elsewhere, my story had planted the seed of unintended consequences deep in the fertile soil of chance. Blowback, the wonks call it now. Reaping the whirlwind. Although by the time germination occurred, the matter had assumed the nature of a hybrid, its traits drawn literally from all those spy novels I had once read with such youthful interest.

  Page by page, I would be lured back into an era when fact and fiction were virtually indistinguishable, yet with consequences that were anything but dated.

  2

  SEPTEMBER 2010

  The envelope poked like a white tongue from my Georgetown mail slot, making it seem that the front door was taunting me as I approached my empty town house at dusk. I was wondering why the postman hadn’t shoved it on through until, plucking it free, I saw it was neither stamped nor addressed. Only the formal version of my name, “William D. Cage,” was typed on the outside. It was sealed.

  Ignoring the bills and flyers piled on the rug, I took it to the living room chair by the window so I’d have enough light to read. I was about to tear it open when the refined quality of the envelope seemed to demand the use of a letter opener, so I rose to fetch a silver one from my writing desk before returning to the chair, feeling instinctively that this wouldn’t be something I’d want to read standing up.

  Inserting the blade at the end, I flicked it down the crease with the skill of an assassin, releasing a scent that was strangely nostalgic.

  Smells like … Europe, I nearly said aloud. But that seemed ludicrous, even impossible. So I raised it to my nose, and there it was again, unmistakable, a hint of all those grand way stations of my youth in the depths of their winter gloom—sulfurous coal smoke, hosed cobbles, the chill damp of a low gray sky—even though in Georgetown it was warm and muggy, a summery day at the end of September. Weird.

  A single sheet was folded inside. The paper itself looked and felt oddly familiar, the sort of fine, sturdy bond you find only at better stationers. The contents were brief but remarkable:

  Message posted for you concerning the whole truth about your onetime acquaintance, Mr. E.L. of Maine. To retrieve, use Folly’s tradecraft, page 47. Then use book code, line 11. The dead drop will be known to you, just as it was to Ashenden from the very beginning. Welcome to the real Double Game.


  Well, now.

  E.L., obviously, was Edwin Lemaster, still living and still writing, way up in the north woods of Maine, where he no longer granted interviews. The idea that there might be some sort of “whole truth” yet to discover about him was intriguing, but so were the multiple literary references that jumped from the page. Folly was of course Lemaster’s Richard Folly, and the tradecraft prompt seemed to be directing me to page 47 of The Double Game, probably the hardback edition. Ashenden was an early hero of the espionage canon from the eponymous 1928 novel by Somerset Maugham, yet another author who had spied for his country. I assumed that the wording “from the very beginning” meant I should scan the book’s opening pages for some clue as to the whereabouts of the purported dead drop, which, in the spy trade, was a secret place for stashing messages.

  The allusion to a book code was, for the moment, over my head. I knew what a book code was—a way for spies to communicate by using a shared literary passage as a decoding tool. But which book should I use? And on what page? And with what set of numbers for line 11? I turned over the note, but the other side was blank.

  That’s when I noticed the ghostly watermark—the outline of an elaborate crest and the maker’s name, Gohrsmühle. Now I knew why it reeked of the Old World. The paper had been manufactured in Germany decades ago, and there was a box of it upstairs in the drawer of my bedside table. I had bought it after we moved to Berlin when I was seventeen, to write letters to a girlfriend I’d left behind in Vienna. My first love, and my first secret correspondence. Only seven sheets of it remained—six now, presumably—and the envelope had almost certainly come from the same box.

  I then noticed irregularities in the typeface. Every i was slightly raised, and the upper chamber of each e was filled with ink. Meaning the note must have been typed on my old manual Royal, a keepsake I had appropriated long ago from a Post scrap pile during newsroom renovations. It, too, was upstairs, in a locked attic office.

  I am not generally one for dramatics, but something like a shiver passed through me. Whoever left this message had not only been in my house, but he had also taken his time, digging up the stationery and then breaking into my office to type, raising a clatter you could have heard next door. For all I knew, he was still up there. Or maybe he’d made off with everything, my Royal and the whole box of stationery.

  Worry turned to anger, and I ran up the stairs two at a time. A practical joke was one thing, a home invasion quite another.

  No one was there. The box of stationery was safe in its drawer, minus a sheet and an envelope. The typewriter still sat on the desk. The door to the office was locked, and showed no signs of tampering.

  Surely the front door of the house would tell a different story. My neighborhood was hardly immune to crime, and over the years I had invested in a stout deadbolt and an alarm system. But the status light on the system monitor still glowed a benign green, and the deadbolt was unmolested. So were the doorjamb, the kitchen door, and the slider in the back. Every window was secure.

  I felt like one of Ian Fleming’s Bond martinis—shaken, not stirred. Returning to the kitchen, I poured three fingers of bourbon and drained half of it in two scalding swallows. Only when it began lighting up my nervous system did the real point of this elaborate intrusion occur to me:

  It, too, in both style and substance, had been stolen from the pages of an old spy novel.

  I stepped to the bookshelves by the fireplace, where it took me only seconds to locate A Fragment of Fear, a 1965 novel by John Bingham. While I was at it, I grabbed my yellowed paperback of Maugham’s Ashenden and the hardback of The Double Game, then took everything to the couch.

  Flipping through the Bingham, I found what I was after in chapter three, a scene in which the main character receives a threatening note, then realizes it must have been typed on his own typewriter with his own stationery, even though his home showed no sign of a break-in. Bravo. I toasted the intruder’s ingenuity and drained the bourbon.

  What made this little stunt even more fascinating was that Bingham was not just any author. A titled Brit also known as Lord Clanmorris, he, too, had spied for his country, and he was a fine writer. But his greatest claim to literary fame was by proxy. He was reputedly a model for fictional spymaster George Smiley, John le Carré’s very own Folly, and yet another fabled mole hunter. Not to mention that, to my mind, Bingham’s best work was a novel called The Double Agent. Someone had moles on the brain.

  My earlier inclination had been to phone the police. I now dismissed the idea. Rattled as I was, my curiosity was stronger, and if the police got hold of these items I might never get them back. Plus, with no sign of a break-in, and all the materials coming from upstairs, they might even conclude I’d cooked it up myself. A publicity stunt from a man paid to create them.

  One thing I could say with certainty—whoever did this either knew me well or had done plenty of research. I could think of only one person who would’ve spotted all the references in the note, and that was my father. But break-ins and practical jokes weren’t his style, and the topic of Edwin Lemaster remained off-limits.

  Dad was retired now and still living abroad, although I’d seen him only a few weeks earlier at the funeral of a family friend, Wils Nethercutt. The service, oddly enough, had produced its own quirky Lemaster moment, which I couldn’t help but recall.

  The burial was on Block Island. Getting there required a drive to Rhode Island plus a ferry crossing, and I arrived just as the doors of the church were closing. I slid into a pew up front where my father sat alone, two rows behind Nethercutt’s widow, Dorothy. The church was only a quarter full, a gathering dominated by stooped, white-haired men, some of whose faces were vaguely familiar. A few doddered up to the pulpit to tell old stories about the deceased—spy tales, it seemed, an impression reinforced when a fellow in the back stood to lock the church doors, then posted himself like a sentry.

  “Bunch of old spooks,” my father whispered disapprovingly, but I was entertained. The stories were lighthearted, even funny, although the narrators kept names and locations to a minimum, as if still living by their old rules.

  Toward the end of the service there was a brief stir when heads turned toward the sound of creaking floorboards in the balcony. No one had switched on the lights up there, so all you could see was a thin figure in gray, seated in the shadows. During the final prayer I saw him duck out a door, and he was gone well before everyone began filing out. There was no sign of him at the reception, but an agitated old fellow in a wheelchair insisted loudly that it must have been Edwin Lemaster.

  “That pariah?” one of the few women in attendance answered shrilly. “Surely not.”

  “Easy, Val,” someone cautioned. “Plenty of us are still on good terms.”

  “Why a pariah?” I asked Dad. I was feeling both relieved and disappointed by having missed a fresh encounter with my onetime idol.

  “Lemaster was never a favorite of some of the people here.”

  “Like that woman Val?”

  “Apparently. I’m not familiar with her, but she’s probably Agency.”

  “Who’s the one in the wheelchair?”

  “Giles Cabot. At one time, he and Nethercutt were practically joined at the hip, so no one was surprised when they both retired here. Good to see him out and about.”

  “What did he do for the Agency?”

  Dad surprised me with a direct answer.

  “A top deputy in counterintelligence. For that paranoid old nut, Jim Angleton.”

  “Is that what Mr. Nethercutt did, too?”

  “You aren’t supposed to know that, but yes. Angleton’s people were always a little prickly and superior for my taste, even when they made the rounds of the embassies. But that was the required persona if you worked for Jim: Us Against the World.”

  “How’d we end up being invited to this?”

  “Wils was a year ahead of me at Yale, and our fathers were friends. But I imagine it was more a case of Dorothy try
ing to fill the pews. Not many old timers left from State or the Agency.”

  “Dorothy looks familiar.”

  “We used to see a lot of the Nethercutts those two years in Georgetown. You were pretty young then.”

  I went for a drink. Dad sought refuge with a pair of old colleagues from State. They huddled with their backs to the ex-spooks like shipwreck survivors on a raft.

  I wandered awhile, intending to mingle. But these were careful people, and every conversation dropped in volume the moment I moved within range. After a while it became mildly amusing, like making the signal come and go on an old radio by touching the antenna.

  I worked my way back toward Dad just as a commotion erupted across the room, over by the bar. Once again Cabot, the fellow in the wheelchair, was in the thick of things, except this time a trim fellow in silver hair was leaning down into his face, gesturing emphatically. The tendons stood out in the man’s neck and his hands slashed the air. Someone off to the side in a bright blue suit tried to intervene.

  “Honestly, Breece, what’s the harm in it!” The gesturing man wheeled on him.

  “Goddammit, Stu. Stay out of this!”

  Cabot spoke up, but his voice was too low for me to hear the words.

  “The guy named Breece looks familiar,” I said. “Has he been in the Post, or on TV?”

  “Not if he can help it. Breece Preston is allergic to publicity. But not to attention, as you can see. Poor old Cabot, Preston will eat him alive. Just look at the way he’s—”

  Dad halted in midsentence. He looked away from the scene and placed a hand on my arm.

  “Why don’t we get some air?” he said. “I see that the smokers have begun firing up their weapons of mass destruction.”