The Double Game

by Dan Fesperman

Those questions were answered on the second sheet, although I gasped at its contents. A yellowed page 93, torn roughly from Lemaster’s first novel, Knee Knockers, was pasted to the paper. So was a sliced-out square from the book’s copyright page, which showed that the book was a first edition from 1969. More typescript was below.

  This certainly ruled out my father as a suspect. He would sooner torture a small animal than carve up a cherished first edition. If tearing a page out of an old book sounds like no big deal, consider that a first edition of Knee Knockers now fetches up to $5,000, double that if it’s signed. A defaced volume is practically worthless. Mercenary considerations aside, to any bibliophile this was an act of malice, and it told me that someone was harboring quite a grudge, against either Lemaster or the owner of the book.

  But enough of that. There was a book code to decipher, and the numbers were my guide. In each pair, the first one told me which word to count to on line eleven, and the second told me which letter to use. Soon enough I had the message:

  You were halfway there in eighty four. Finish the job. Instructions on line seventeen.

  Line seventeen began a passage of dialogue between Folly and operative Karl Breeden:

  “How long do you think I’ll need?” Breeden asked.

  “Maybe two weeks,” Folly said. “Three tops.”

  “Any travel?”

  “Vienna for sure. Probably Budapest. We’ll communicate through the usual channels. Stay where you always do. Use the code name Dewey.”

  “And from there?”

  “Await my instructions in Vienna. I’ll be in touch.”

  Clearly, these were my marching orders. Just as clearly, my quarry was Edwin Lemaster, or rather, the Lemaster who had once worked for the CIA. The message signed off with a sort of warning, typed at the bottom of the second sheet:

  Management not responsible if you end up like Mr. Hambledon’s description on p. 78.

  Hambledon. The name rang a bell, but I couldn’t place it. I checked page 78 of Knee Knockers and The Double Game, but came up empty. I flipped through Ashenden in case a Hambledon played a minor role, but he wasn’t there, either. Hambledon. I had read it long ago, but for the moment it was lost in the fog of memory.

  The mantel clock struck two. Practical matters began to intervene. Ealing Wharton needed me in top form tomorrow, and I would be lucky to get four hours of sleep. I was due to testify on Capitol Hill on behalf of our newest client, makers of the Lattelicious Superluxe, a milk frother implicated in a dozen house fires. Some congressman, scenting an easy opportunity for publicity, had called for a hearing to examine how our client and its regulators had allowed such shoddy merchandise onto store shelves. My job was to take the heat alongside our client’s CEO, who was as clueless about PR as his technical people were about wiring. We were meeting at seven to prepare.

  But all I could think about as I climbed into bed was whether I should continue this spy hunt and, if so, how quickly I might arrange time off for a trip to Europe. Vienna, of all places. Home not only to my dad, but to my richest boyhood memories.

  I was being used, of course. I had no illusions about that. I had often watched my firm’s managing director, Marty Ealing, entice some congressman or other to do his bidding with a similar blend of flattery, intrigue, and misdirection. He always made them believe it was in their own interest, when usually it was in Marty’s. And by letting them lead the way, they were the ones who encountered any snares and booby traps.

  Who, then, was using me, and toward what end? And how dangerous were the booby traps? Those questions kept me awake for the next hour or so, while the name Hambledon fluttered above me like a moth until I finally drifted off.

  After what felt like only minutes, the alarm shrieked. I shut it off and lay in the sudden silence. That’s when the moth landed on my forehead and whispered its name:

  Tommy Hambledon.

  He was a spymaster created by author Manning Coles, the pen name of a British mixed-doubles writing team—Adelaide Frances Oke Manning and Cyril Henry Coles. The latter worked for British Intelligence, the former for the war office. They wrote dozens of Tommy Hambledon books. My dad had fifteen, but I owned only one—Drink to Yesterday, the first in the series, published way back in 1940.

  I threw on a robe, descended the stairs in slippered feet, and retrieved the volume from the highest shelf. Dust puffed from the jacket as I turned to page 78.

  At the bottom of the page, Tommy Hambledon told an excited new recruit exactly what entering the spy trade was about to do to his life:

  “Yes, it’s got you now, and it will never let you go. When once the job has taken hold you’ll find that nothing else in life has any kick in it, and apart from the job you’re dead. Neither the fields of home nor the arts of peace nor the love of women will suffice.”

  Under my present circumstances it sounded more like an enticement than a warning, and even as I began mapping my morning strategy for defending the fallen virtue of the Lattelicious Superluxe, in the back of my mind I already knew one thing for sure.

  Used or not, I was going to Vienna.

  4

  You’ve probably guessed by now that I was an only child, and that my dad was a single parent. Two males, each playing solitaire, yet pleasantly companionable in our vagabond tour of Cold War Europe.

  Only one memory of my mother survives, and even it remains in shadow. It is night, and I am two years old. We are living in Belgrade, forever my city of ill fortune. She stands backlit in my bedroom doorway, face in silhouette, features obscured. I am supposed to be asleep, so I shut my eyes as she steps forward in the dark to kiss me. Her lips are cool against my forehead. Her perfume is heady and Parisian, a scent phantom that has stalked me through life, growing fainter by the year.

  She left us just before I turned three, then visited a few days later on the weekend of my birthday. Once the candles were blown out and I’d gone to bed, she and my father discussed how to divvy up custody. Then she went off to Greece, where a week later she died in a bus accident on some lonely hill in the Peloponnese. Probably while traveling with another man, I later surmised, although my father never said.

  I like to believe that her absence made me a more careful observer. Children let their mothers do a lot of watching for them—keeping an eye out for cars, or for lurking strangers. My father hired nannies and sitters, of course, but I must have sensed that they never had quite the same stake in matters as a mom, so I developed a keener eye, a heightened awareness.

  Her absence was at the heart of an ongoing conspiracy by which my father and I carefully avoided discussing delicate personal issues. Doing so would have risked having the subject of her desertion come up, so we spoke instead of the world around us—sports, school, current events. And books, always books. In Budapest, when I was nine or ten, the subject of American spies was in the news, so one night I asked my dad what it was, exactly, that spies did.

  “Oh, things that we never see. With an import we can never be certain of. But rest assured, they make a difference, and they’re out there each and every day.”

  “Where?”

  “All around us.” He chuckled and shook the ice in his cocktail—a gin and tonic, so it must have been summer. “Like God.”

  It was a surprising answer, considering he’d never once taken me to church, so I asked the logical follow-up.

  “Do you believe in God?”

  “Absolutely. Life didn’t just spring up out of thin air.”

  “What do you think he’s like?”

  “Oh, I doubt it’s a he or she, don’t you? I’ve never understood why everyone has to turn God into such a human, and not a very nice one at that. A petty know-it-all who demands to be worshipped, and will damn you to Hell if you don’t.”

  Henceforth, the subjects of spies and God were intertwined in my mind. Both came to represent the unknown and the unknowable, which is probably why I was predisposed to like those novels of Dad’s. They were textual glances into th
e firmament.

  Now, here I was about to join the priesthood, so to speak, by heading back to Vienna where all those first editions still lined his shelves—signed, dated, and dusted once a week. As a boy I’d occasionally spotted what I thought were glimmers of real characters hiding in their thickets of prose, especially Lemaster’s.

  “Dad,” I would ask, “is this Mr. So-and-So from the embassy he’s writing about?”

  “No, son, it’s a novel. All the characters are made up.”

  “But—”

  “They’re not real people, Bill.”

  And that would close the subject until I spotted the next one, peeping from the pages like a fugitive. Now, based on the messages I’d received, it didn’t seem far-fetched to believe that every answer I sought might be found within those books.

  But first things first. The secular business of Ealing Wharton awaited. I also needed a plausible excuse to go snooping around in my old backyard of Europe. Cover, in other words. Building a legend, as Folly would have put it. To do the work of a spy, I would have to start behaving like one, especially if someone was already tracking me.

  God and spying. Father and son. A mole’s two masters. Tandems were much on my mind after my night of eerie visitations. Let the Double Game proceed.

  5

  My first independent act of espionage in Operation Lemaster, as it would later come to be known in official channels, was to lie to my boss. Easy. Having spent the morning dissembling under oath on behalf of a milk frother, fibbing to Marty Ealing for my own benefit felt as righteous as a donation to Amnesty International.

  “Hate to drop this on you now, Marty, but I need a few weeks off. It’s personal.”

  “Personal?”

  We were in Marty’s office, and I knew I’d said the magic word. To Marty, “personal” is where everything juicy goes to hide, the stuff of leverage and control.

  “It’s my dad.”

  Marty frowned. Clearly he’d hoped for something messier, preferably a woman married to someone other than me. I have zero respect for Marty, which is one reason I still run. It takes at least four hard miles along the C&O towpath to sweat out a day’s labors at Ealing Wharton.

  “He’s seventy-eight and lives alone in Vienna.” Sensing I was losing my audience, I picked up the pace. “I’m all he’s got, and, well, you know how it goes at that age.”

  “Say no more, Bill. Hell, after the way you wrapped that committee around your middle finger this morning”—Marty always telegraphs his punch lines—“how could I say no? We’ll work out any adjustment to your compensation later.”

  My second act was to phone Arch Bascombe, an old colleague from the Post who was now an editor at Vanity Fair. Might he be interested, I asked, in a freelance piece on the espionage career of author Edwin Lemaster?

  “Isn’t he the one you burned in that interview piece way back when?”

  “At least you remember.”

  “So you finally got to the bottom of that?”

  “Getting there. Headed to Vienna tomorrow, in fact.”

  “I’ll bite. On spec, of course. And I can’t cover expenses.”

  “Understood. But a letter of introduction would help. You’d be surprised how much weight that still carries in the Old World.”

  Bascombe was charmed by the idea, and the price was right. He emailed me an official-looking letter on magazine letterhead. My cover was set.

  I then telephoned the one person in Washington whose opinion still mattered to me. My son, David.

  Like a politician who pays too much attention to approval ratings, I’d been making something of a comeback with David during the past year, and nothing had pleased me more. While it would be nice to think my own efforts were responsible—I’d taken him on some college visits during his senior year of high school, and in the spring I’d attended all his lacrosse games—the real reason was his own maturation. Not only had he become an engaging and interesting young man, he had learned not to hold a grudge.

  He was a freshman at Georgetown, right across the neighborhood, and we had dinner once a week. Now that he no longer lived at home, I was at last on equal footing with his mother for shared time. I wanted to let him know I’d be going abroad.

  Fortunately he was free for the evening. He picked Martin’s Tavern, a hangout at Wisconsin and N within walking distance for both of us. As always, I arrived ten minutes early. Once you’ve deserted a child, you never again want him to enter a room where you’re supposed to be waiting and find it empty.

  Martin’s is one of those places with English hunting prints on the wall and a brass rail at the bar. I ordered a pint of ale and settled into a booth. David arrived on schedule. Salazar, a waiter familiar with all the regulars, directed him to our table.

  I stood to give him a hug, a greeting he’d recently begun reciprocating.

  “You look good, David.” He was flushed from a workout. He’d be playing college lacrosse in the spring, but they already had him running and lifting weights. I loved watching him play because his motor never quit. It made me believe that somewhere inside him beat the heart of a distance runner, although I knew better than to say so.

  “You look good, too, Dad. What’d you do, quit your job?”

  He was perceptive in that way, like his grandfather.

  “Next best thing. I’m taking some time off. Going to Vienna to see your granddad. After that, who knows? But I’ll be gone a few weeks.”

  Salazar took our standard order—the Delmonico for David, lamb chops for me.

  “How are your classes going?”

  “Not as hard as I thought they’d be.”

  “That comes later, when they know you’ve let your guard down.”

  Sensing the onset of a fatherly lecture, he nimbly changed the subject.

  “So how come you never told me about the history of this place?” He beamed as he said it, in the manner of all college freshmen bursting with new knowledge.

  “Martin’s has a history? I know Washington never slept here.”

  “Spies. It was a KGB hangout in the seventies. Some big-shot controller used to meet his boss here. Before that there was Elizabeth Bentley, the Red Spy Queen. She’d come here for drinks during the war, then meet her contact at a pharmacy down the street. Then there was the Russian defector, Oleg Kalugin, who ran out on his CIA contact from a restaurant right across the street, where the Five Guys is now. And about six blocks from here is where crazy Jim Angleton used to have his three-martini lunches, sometimes with Kim Philby. They were buddies, you know.”

  “Whoa, now.” I took a big swallow of ale to hide my unease. The one topic I didn’t want to raise, and he’d raised it. “Where’d you learn all that?” Not from a sealed envelope slipped beneath his door, I hoped.

  “I’m taking an intro to European history since World War II. For the Cold War he had us read The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. Awesome book. It made me want to look up all the spy stuff that happened around here. I kept thinking of all those novels of yours, so I’ve been checking out some of them from the library.”

  Like father, like son, like grandson.

  “Don’t bother with the library. Just ask. Or come and take them; you’ve got a key.”

  It then hit me with devastating suddenness that David would have made the perfect accomplice for whoever was orchestrating my adventures, and for a millisecond I was perched on the edge of hurt and disappointment, thinking he would now reveal all with a belly laugh at my expense. A spy book caper, cooked up to spoof me. Just as quickly the moment passed. There were too many details he wouldn’t have known, and he certainly didn’t have the means to have broken into the house at the dead drop. And this was David, not some client at Ealing Wharton.

  “Holy shit,” he said quietly. He was looking over my shoulder.

  “What is it?”

  “She looks just like Elizabeth Bentley. But it can’t be.”

  “The Red Spy Queen?”

  “Bentley wo
re a red carnation and carried a copy of Life magazine. And that woman over there …”

  I turned and saw a slender woman alone at the table by the door. Attractive, late twenties. A red carnation was pinned to her navy business suit, and she was flipping through a magazine. I caught Salazar’s eye, figuring I’d ask if he knew her. About then a noisy party of six burst through the door, blocking his way and obscuring our view.

  “Yes, Mr. Cage?” Salazar had finally made it through the maelstrom.

  I kept my voice low, although the new arrivals were making quite a commotion.

  “That woman by the door, the one with the flower on her lapel.”

  He glanced over his shoulder, then frowned.

  “By the door?”

  The arrivals eased toward the back, clearing the view. The table was now empty.

  “Wow,” David said. “That was awesome.”

  “Never mind,” I said. The puzzled Salazar left to attend to the rowdy newcomers. If David hadn’t been there I might have wondered if I’d seen her at all, but now I was wondering if she was the woman with the Alsatian.

  “Something I should probably tell you about this trip,” I said. “I may be doing some work over there that’s a little, well, unorthodox.”

  “For Ealing Wharton?”

  “God, no. I’d never stick my neck out for them. Freelance stuff. For Vanity Fair.”

  “Wow. You’re writing again?”

  I was pleased by his excitement.

  “Maybe. In fact, I’m looking into some old stuff from the Cold War.” I realized I’d said too much when he connected the dots right away.

  “So do you think that woman with the carnation—”

  “No. I don’t. But keep an eye on the house while I’m gone, if you don’t mind. Take all the books you want. If you get a strange text from me now and then, take it in stride, but don’t tell anyone else. And, for God’s sake, whatever you do—”

  “Don’t tell Mom?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wouldn’t do that.” Then, as if something had suddenly occurred to him. “Is that what you think I’ve been doing all these years? Reporting back to Mom?”