“Maybe you can show me, after I’ve finished my coffee.”
“I’d be glad to.”
“As long as no one from my school sees me first.”
“Same here.” We laughed, the kinship of fugitives.
As we went out the door a few minutes later she actually took my arm, a gesture that felt exciting and old-fashioned at the same time, and at that moment I knew I was on to something more profound and special than any previous flirtation. We were together until the day I moved to Berlin, roughly a year later. The relationship changed us both, mostly for the better.
All this reminiscing broke my concentration, and when I checked my watch it was only a few minutes before 10:30. Wondering if my contact had also arrived early, I scanned the room for likely suspects.
To my left, in the corner booth up front, were a middle-aged man and woman, both wearing scarves. A small “Reserviert” placard indicated they were regulars, entitled to a Stammtisch, or customary table. They were discussing the German satirist Kurt Tucholsky. To their right sat a quiet elderly woman wearing a double strand of pearls. Along the opposite wall, facing me from across the room, was a young couple too absorbed in each other to notice anyone but themselves. Out in the middle was a table of three women, late forties, very proper in manner. To my right, a young male professional type in suit and tie who had come in on crutches.
Figuring I had better clear the decks by settling the bill, I nodded to the waiter, who arrived promptly and stated the total. He uttered a polite “Danke” as I named an amount that would allow for a hefty tip. While he was making change, the door opened, and I couldn’t see around him until the new arrival had passed and was on the way to the back. I was mildly surprised to see it was a woman, but she disappeared down the corridor toward the rest rooms before I could see her face. It had to be my contact. It was time to enter the phone booth.
I did as the script demanded, turning my back to the window as I deposited coins and punched in a number. I mumbled a few words of nonsense into the mouthpiece, and when I’d judged that a minute had passed, I turned to see if my contact was waiting, so that the exchange could take place.
The newly arrived woman stood just outside the door, staring back at me through the glass. We both gasped. Even after more than thirty years, I recognized Litzi Strauss right away, and she clearly recognized me as well. We stood motionless with our mouths open for a few seconds, then I opened the door. Next I was supposed to take whatever she handed me and keep on walking.
No way.
Instead, I fell back on a much older script, one that I had rehearsed only once.
“Meeting someone?”
“No. You?”
“Harry Lime.”
She laughed and fell into my arms. Then, remembering what had reunited us, we disengaged somewhat awkwardly, and she withdrew a sealed manila envelope from beneath her coat.
“I believe I’m supposed to give this to you.”
“It’s called a brush pass.”
She rolled her eyes, just as she had years ago when I mentioned The Third Man.
“I think now I’m supposed to be on my way, never to see you again.”
“Terrible idea. Let’s go for a walk.”
She smiled and nodded, and as we reached the door she put her arm through mine. I actually blushed. Not in embarrassment, but in a flood of memory. It was so powerful that I had to take a deep breath once we were out in the sunlight.
“Did you know it would be me?” she asked. She was flushed, too.
“No. How ’bout you?”
“Are you kidding?”
We were speaking German, right back to our old ways.
“Then whoever is pulling the strings knows me even better than I thought.”
“You’re not the one who arranged this?” There was a note of concern in her voice.
“No. So you don’t know who’s behind this, either?”
“I thought I did. An old friend from university asked me for a favor. I was supposed to be passing material to a corporate headhunter for a friend in Salzburg, things he was too nervous to send by email. What about you?”
“It’s a long story,” I said. “Got time to hear it?”
She smiled.
“Of course. But aren’t you going to open that?” She nodded at the envelope.
“And ruin our reunion? It can wait. How many years has it been?”
“Do we really want to count?”
“Where to, then? Harry Lime’s?”
“Certainly, but I’m afraid you won’t like it very much.” There was a gleam of mischief in her eyes as she towed me toward Josefstadt with her hand warm on my arm. What a strange sensation it was, to leap so suddenly across a chasm of decades only to alight on the same sidewalk you’d left from.
As we rounded the corner I saw what she meant. The marble façade of Harry’s grand old building was now covered by scaffolding and a huge sheet of plastic, with a full-color ad for a Burger King Whopper. Marty Ealing would have loved it.
“The death of art,” I said.
“Seeing as how there are ten museums within a block of here, I doubt one hamburger will topple the empire. But it is annoying to see it every time I look out my office window.”
“Where do you work?”
She pointed back across the square, toward the grandiose expanse of the Austrian National Library.
“You’re a librarian?”
“An archivist. Old letters and manuscripts, mostly.”
“I suppose now you’re going to tell me you’re married with eleven children.”
“One husband, an ex. No children, I’m sorry to say.”
“I have an ex as well. But a son, he’s eighteen.”
“Lucky you.”
“I am lucky, even though he grew up mostly with his mother.”
I thought of my parting conversation with David, and wondered what he would think of this little scene, and of Litzi.
“Let’s have lunch,” she said. “Buy a baguette and eat in the park. It’s too nice a day to go back indoors.”
I immediately agreed.
I suppose I should have wondered right then how my handler had managed to bring about this reunion, and how he knew so much about my past. But for the moment, on a beautiful morning with Litzi’s arm through mine, my mind was on anything but spying.
So off we went to lunch, heedless of anyone but ourselves.
9
Had you asked me to predict how Litzi would look after all this time, I would have erred on the side of frumpy. As a girl she had her mother’s fair complexion and blond hair, but her mother was also a standard-issue hausfrau, stout and sturdy, with a face as puffy as bread dough. Her father, from Bohemia, was thinner, with hollow eyes and prominent cheekbones, the face of a refugee. It was clear now that Litzi had borrowed the best from both sides. Fair complexion, but with features winnowed to their essentials. A few worry lines, but not enough to shake her air of earnest calm, although there did seem to be a hint of past disappointment in the depths of her eyes. Her blond hair was touched by gray, but she still had the posture of a dancer, lithe and graceful. It made me wonder how I was measuring up, then I told myself to stop, that we were far beyond that now.
We bought sandwiches at a bakery and walked to a park on the far side of the National Library, where ravens stalked the green and cawed for handouts. We sat at the base of a fountain and talked for a while about our lives and our jobs and what had become of the years while the water gurgled behind us. Then she nodded toward the sealed envelope, which lay at my feet in the grass.
“Well, are you going to tell me what this is all about?”
In all those spy novels, of course, the oldest and best advice was to trust no one. The same was true when I’d been a journalist, and more so at Ealing Wharton, where your level of mistrust was roughly proportionate to your annual bonus. But I had long ago noticed something about people who followed this advice. All of them seemed to wind up al
one. I knew because I was one of them.
Today, I decided, I would act sixteen again, if only for the afternoon, if only for Litzi, and if only because for the moment I no longer wanted to be alone. Besides, she and I had lived through a lot together, some of it anything but child’s play. If anyone had been battle-tested to protect my secrets, it was Litzi Strauss.
“How much time do you have?”
“As much as we need. While you were buying lunch I texted my office. They believe I’m at an urgent appointment that will keep me away for most of the afternoon.”
“Do you remember all those Edwin Lemaster books my father had?”
She rolled her eyes and smiled, a wary but willing audience. I continued talking, and told her everything. She didn’t interrupt once, and was silent for a while when I finished.
“Amazing,” she finally said. “In my work I sometimes spend hours going through old letters, or some diary from centuries ago, and I’m always struck by how much those people come to life for me. But these are made-up characters you’re talking about, yet it’s like they’ve stepped right off the page. It makes me wish I’d been there to meet the fellow who delivered the envelope to me. He looked so strange.”
“You saw him?”
“I wasn’t supposed to. Karl, my friend in Salzburg, told me someone would drop it at the library’s reception desk with my name on it.”
I turned over the envelope. “Litzi Strauss” was written in the same blocky handwriting that had been on the parcel from Kurzmann’s.
“I figured it would probably be delivered by a courier service, but the other arrangements were so strange that I wanted to check, just in case, so I asked our man at the reception desk to note the exact time when the envelope was delivered. Later I checked the day’s footage from the security cameras, and there he was.”
“You’re a natural, Litzi.”
She smiled shyly. “Maybe I am. And it was no courier service, let me tell you! You should have seen him. A chilly morning on the first of October and he’s wearing an undersized summer-weight suit of that crinkly blue and white material you only seem to see in America.”
“Seersucker?”
“Yes! Seersucker.”
Something tugged at a hook deep in the pond of memory, but Litzi was off and running.
“The front pocket of his jacket was stuffed with pens, a whole row. At first I even thought he was wearing some kind of ID badge, but no, it was all pens.”
Whatever had been nibbling at my subconscious now struck with full force. I began reeling it to the surface.
“A seersucker, you said.”
“Yes.”
“With a pocketful of pens?”
“Yes.”
“Was he wearing glasses?”
“Sort of an old-fashioned pair.”
“And he was fat?”
“Maybe not fat, but a little overweight. Soft-looking. Do you know him?”
“Was he carrying anything else?”
She thought about it.
“A briefcase. A thin one, with a big tag.”
“Unbelievable.”
“You do know him.”
“Where’s the nearest bookstore?”
“Only a few blocks, you know Vienna. Why? Who was he?”
“I have to show you something.”
She impatiently led the way to a Buchladen that was far neater than Kurzmann’s. All the while she pressed me for answers, but I didn’t want to spoil the surprise, and was hoping my memory wasn’t playing tricks on me.
I made a beeline for the novels and checked the A’s, for Ambler, Eric. Fortunately his books have made a comeback in recent years. You can now find paperback reprints both in the U.S. and abroad. A German version would be fine, as long as they had a copy.
“What are you doing?” Litzi asked for what must have been the third time.
“Looking for your courier.”
And there he was, right next to a copy of A Coffin for Dimitrios. Or, rather, there was the book, Judgment on Deltchev, a fine little novel from early in the Cold War that Ambler had published in 1951. I’d read it cover to cover on the train from Prague to Vienna a week before turning fifteen.
I took it down and flipped through the pages. If I was correct, the reference came fairly early. Yes, there it was on the first page of the second chapter. I handed it to Litzi.
“Last paragraph. Read it.”
The passage describes the novel’s hero, Foster, as he arrives in an unnamed Eastern European capital, where he is met by Georghi Pashik, a shifty man of mixed loyalties. Pashik played a pivotal role in the plot, and his mysterious presence had stuck with me long after I finished the book. Here is the English version of what Litzi read:
I saw him standing on the platform as the train drew in: a short, dark, flabby man in rimless glasses and a tight seersucker suit with an array of fountain pens in his handkerchief pocket. Under his arm he carried a thin, black dispatch case with a silver medallion hanging from the zipper tag. He stood by a pillar gazing about him with the imperious anxiety of a wealthy traveler who sees no porter and knows that he cannot carry his own baggage. I think it was the fountain pens that identified him for me. He wore them like a badge.
Litzi’s eyes widened. Then she put a hand to her mouth and laughed.
“Oh, my God! So now I’m living in a novel, too?”
“As a librarian, you should be honored.”
“Archivist. Dealing with facts. When I was a girl I read Emil and the Detectives, just like everyone else. Then I grew up. But this is quite a coincidence.”
“It’s intentional. It’s my handler’s way of telling me how well he knows me. He’s been yanking my chain, and now he’s yanking yours.”
“But what if I’d never checked the video?”
“You did, though. That’s what matters, and he was ready for it. He had his man dress for the occasion, just like he was playing a role.” I took the book from her hands, hefting it like Exhibit A for the prosecution, although I wasn’t yet sure of the charges, much less of the suspect. “Obviously someone is taking this very seriously.”
“May I ask a question?”
“Of course.”
“Why are you doing this? If it’s serious, like you say, then why take the risk just to go chasing after your past? Isn’t the present enough for you?”
“Do you think that’s all this is?”
“Certainly it’s part of it. Your interview with Lemaster. Your father’s little missions to the bookstore. Me. It’s almost like an analyst was taking you back through a series of repressed memories.”
“I never repressed any memories about you.”
“Didn’t you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’ve always hidden things from both of us. So have I.”
“We have?”
She shook her head, like she couldn’t quite believe I didn’t agree. Or maybe she was just being Litzi, provocative for its own sake, the way she’d always been.
“You Austrians. A nation of Freuds.”
“You Americans. So innocent about the world, except when you’re trying to run it.”
That sort of broke the mood. We left the bookstore and wandered aimlessly up the block. She briefly took my hand, squeezing it as if to make peace, but neither of us said much for a minute or two. I think we realized we’d reached a crossing point. It was time to either say good-bye or find some pretext to keep the day going.
I knew which option I preferred, although the sealed envelope tucked beneath my left arm was making demands of its own. Litzi checked her watch.
“My office must be wondering if my appointment is ever going to end.”
“You could always text them again.”
“Saying what?”
“That you’re meeting an old friend for a drink.”
She stopped in the middle of the block. Pedestrians eased around us. I watched her face as she considered what to say next.
“And after we have this drink, what then? Dinner? Probably with another drink, or a bottle of wine? Then we go back to my apartment to talk about how wonderful things used to be. And maybe then, because we are both lonely and unattached, we decide to make love for old times’ sake, or for new times’ sake, or for however we decide to justify it. Is that what you have in mind?”
I knew better than to answer. This was the Litzi I remembered, frank and analytical, offering the good with the bad in equal doses, whether you were ready or not. She picked up the thread on her own, as I’d known she would.
“No matter what may have brought us together, Bill, we are not living in one of your old books, and I am not some sort of second chance. I have loved many times since we knew each other, and some of those men meant far more to me than you ever did. My husband’s name was Klaus, and if my womb had not fallen to pieces then we would have raised sons and daughters, more than you could count. So I suppose what I am saying is that, while this is very nice, I don’t wish for either of us to be burdened by expectations.”
I smiled, which seemed to surprise her.
“I’m glad you still get straight to the point, Litzi. Although you’ve thought things through a little further along than I have. Not that I object to where you ended up, with the two of us in bed. But in the life I’ve been leading, sometimes a drink is just a drink. So would you like to have one, or should we call it a day and leave the rest to our memories, repressed or not?”
She smiled back.
“I’d forgotten how easily you could always disarm me. Me and my Austrian earnestness.” She took my arm. We resumed walking. “Let’s have that drink, and then dinner. Then you can take me home, but I won’t invite you upstairs. If you’re still around tomorrow? Well, maybe. But for tonight, how about Restaurant Sperl?”
“God, no. My dad stuffed me full of schnitzel last night at Figlmüller. And if we go to Sperl we really will talk about old times. I’d rather hear about all these men who were so much better than me. Pick someplace new.”
We still talked plenty about the past, of course. All the while the envelope remained with us, unopened, like an unstamped passport for entry to the rest of the week. Neither of us mentioned it until around nine o’clock, after our waiter had poured the last of the wine Litzi had so accurately predicted we would drink.
The Double Game Page 7
