The Double Game

by Dan Fesperman

  I placed it on the end table, where another volume was splayed facedown. This one was nonfiction, a collection of interviews with Graham Greene. When I checked to see what had caught Dad’s eye, a comment about Kim Philby leaped from the page:

  “I can understand a man’s temptation to turn double agent,” Greene said, “for the game becomes more interesting.”

  It was an eerie echo of Lemaster’s remarks in our interview. For the professionals, I suppose, the game was everything. Isn’t that what was driving me as well? The excitement of discovery, the pursuit of the unknown. I knew then that I would keep going, no matter what Dad wanted, but I no longer had any illusions that it would be a romp, a mere puzzle, and Litzi needed to know that as well.

  Shutting the Greene book, I pulled my robe tighter and took a blanket from the couch to cover Dad. I switched off the lamp and returned to bed.

  Hours later I awakened to the smell of bacon and coffee, an American breakfast. Dad wore a suit and tie, a signal that urgent matters were afoot.

  “Where are you going this morning?” I asked.

  “Oh, here and there.” His mood was grim, businesslike. “Unless you’re about to tell me you’re quitting this fool’s errand and heading home.”

  “Did Holly Martins quit when Major Callaway ordered him home?”

  Dad was not amused.

  “In real life, Holly Martins would have wound up facedown in the Danube. Here are the morning papers. Give Litzi my regards, but please keep her out of this.”

  “Don’t worry. That’s the first item on my agenda.”

  “Good.”

  He said nothing further about his plans, and I said nothing about my upcoming appointment. Yesterday the precautions of Moscow Rules had seemed frivolous. This morning they felt like smart planning. Dad grabbed his overcoat and paused by the door.

  “Son,” he said, “at some point you’re going to have to level with me about everything that’s going on, and about what you’re really looking for. I’ll leave it up to you to decide the best moment for that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  It made me feel about thirteen, like I’d been grounded. After he left I listened to the clank and whine of the descending elevator. Then I poured more coffee and took it to the living room, where I found none of the chaos that had greeted me at four a.m.

  Dad had opened the blinds to a full wash of autumn sunlight, and he had reshelved every book. Even the lines of dust I’d noticed the night before had been wiped clean, like fingerprints from the scene of a crime.

  12

  Litzi and I met at the Bräunerhof, of course. A strudel for her, an omelet for me. But my appetite was off, especially once it became clear that Litzi still regarded our appointment as a lark. It was my duty to set her straight, and to talk her out of coming with me, even though the last thing I wanted was to cut short our time together.

  Her kiss the night before had been warm but unfamiliar. We had changed in so many ways, and aging was only part of it. The long slouch into disillusionment had marked us both, and I think each of us recognized it in the other. Yet I was certain that the boy and girl we’d once been were still within us, aching to come out and play. But would that ever happen if I sent her away now?

  “Tell me again about this business of Moscow Rules,” she asked. “Why is it so important?”

  “It means you’re supposed to be extra careful, because you’re on enemy turf. So you use an elevated level of tradecraft.”

  “Bill, we’re in Vienna.”

  “In Smiley’s People the old Estonian, Vladimir, was in a nice park in London. The KGB shot him anyway.”

  “In a novel. At night. During the Cold War. I looked it up online when I got home.”

  I took her hand. She smiled, but I didn’t.

  “Litzi, I know this may seem like harmless fun. I felt that way for a while. But it isn’t. To some people, anyway. Which is why I’d feel a whole lot better if you sat this out. Then, when I’m done, if you still want to see me—”

  She frowned and let go of my hand.

  “You’ve been talking to your father, haven’t you?”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “Has he warned you off me?”

  “He’s warned me off everything but you. And he’d be furious if something happened to you because of me.”

  I told her his story about the beefy guy at the wedding, and the warning about old secrets that had anything to do with code name Dewey. She watched me closely, reappraising. Then she took back my hand.

  “So this is supposed to make me less likely to come along?”

  “Litzi, it’s not a game.”

  “Of course it isn’t. It also isn’t an old letter from an archive, where everyone has been dead for five hundred years. From what you’re saying, this is still alive and breathing. For me that’s a plus, not a minus.”

  “Alive, breathing, and possibly lethal.”

  “I can take care of myself, Bill. Or have you forgotten our last great adventure?”

  “As if that would be possible.”

  Indeed, while my imagination had embellished all those café trysts with my dad, and my youthful errands, the weekend Litzi was referring to had been truly audacious, and might easily have ended in disaster. And, just like now, the whole thing had been my idea.

  It went like this:

  Just after my seventeenth birthday, and only three weeks before Dad and I were due to depart for his posting in Berlin, Litzi and I disappeared together on a farewell excursion. Three nights and four days, all on our own, without telling a soul.

  If the itinerary had been solely up to me, we probably would have hopped a train to Switzerland—Bern, Geneva, or some alpine lodge. My main goal was to establish the means, motive, and opportunity for sexual congress, because at that point we were still virgins. We’d had several notable near misses—frantic, half-naked encounters when we’d narrowly dodged discovery by her parents, by my dad, and, memorably, by a Vienna policeman on foot patrol in the Stadtpark, well after midnight.

  Litzi had bolder ambitions. She proposed a whirlwind tour behind the Iron Curtain—hop across the Czech border to Prague, then onward to darkest East Germany for stops in Dresden and Berlin before returning to Vienna by overnight train. We would thrill to the cloak-and-dagger doings of the beleaguered locals while enjoying the freewheeling sexual atmosphere reputedly engendered by three decades of godless Communism.

  It took weeks of planning to secure the visas and tickets, a chore in which I secretly (or so I thought) availed myself of Dad’s consular connections. Each of us left behind a note saying we were sleeping over with friends for a few nights. By the time everyone figured out what was really up, we were well across the border. To our way of thinking, it was our launch into adulthood.

  The first day went well enough, once we got over the initial awkwardness of traveling as a couple. Czech border authorities hardly glanced at our passports, which I found a little disappointing, and the atmosphere that we at first regarded as mysteriously oppressive soon began to seem merely drab and gloomy. If anyone was keeping tabs on us, we were too wrapped up in each other to notice, especially once we reached the faded glories of Prague, which in those days was coated liberally with soot and decrepitude. We shared sausages and tall mugs of pilsner—ID? Who needs an ID? This was Bohemia!—and I happily showed her all the places where I’d hung out as a fourteen-year-old, and the square where Soviet tanks had rolled in just before I turned twelve.

  The only real disappointment was our innkeeper, who, far from being a Marxist libertine, assigned us to rooms three floors apart, then watched our comings and goings like a strict old aunt. We slept together anyway, dodging her on the creaking back stairway. It was bliss, I have to say, although I’ve often wondered if Litzi felt the same, since seventeen-year-old boys aren’t exactly the world’s most solicitous lovers.

  It was while waiting for departure to East Germany at the Prague train station that we first
noticed someone shadowing us. A man in a brown wool coat seemed to take a special interest as we moved from a baker’s kiosk to the newspaper stand. Then he conspicuously followed us onto the platform.

  We had window seats in one of those cramped compartments with facing benches, three passengers per side, and a sliding glass door with curtains. The compartment was full, and rank with sweat. Our watcher flitted past the door at least four times during the three-hour ride to the border, and on each occasion he made a point of looking at us through the glass. Finally Litzi stood up and brusquely closed the curtains, an action almost immediately countermanded by an old matron seated by the door who scolded Litzi in a surly burst of Czech. Litzi, who knew a little of the language, told me later she’d said, “The rest of us have nothing to hide.”

  We remained on edge as we arrived at the border, but even though the document checks took forever—the East Germans were thorough, as Germans usually are—within an hour we were back under way, and the man in brown was nowhere to be seen. We relaxed as the train crawled along the banks of the winding Elbe, enjoying a dusky view of fairy-tale beeches and rolling hills.

  I switched on a light and took out my book, a novel by ex-spy E. Howard Hunt, who at the time was awaiting sentencing for his Watergate crimes. I’d chosen it mostly for its title, The Berlin Ending, since that was to be the final city on our tour, and my next home.

  The train wasn’t due to stop until Dresden, so when the brakes shrieked and the cars groaned to a halt at a small mountain village a few miles east of Bad Schandau, everyone looked up in annoyance. By then it was nearly dark, and no passengers were waiting on the platform. Then I saw a dozen or so Volkspolizei, or Vopos, come pouring out of the tiny station house, flashlights swiveling, whistles blowing.

  Litzi looked at me, and the crabby woman by the door watched us both as if her worst suspicions had been confirmed. There were heavy footsteps in the corridor, followed by muffled shouting. Several Vopos ran past our window. Another slid open the door of the compartment. Scanning the six of us, he read aloud from an official-looking paper.

  “Fräulein Strauss? Herr Cage?”

  “Ja?” Litzi answered weakly. I shut my book, having just reached a scene in which the authorities were converging on the heroine at a small café near the Brandenburg Gate. Litzi nudged me with her foot.

  “Ja,” I answered.

  “Come with me,” he said in German.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “You are not to ask questions! Come now.”

  We reached for our bags but he waved us off.

  “Leave those! Come now!”

  He took me roughly by the arm and escorted us onto the platform, where more Vopos were waiting. Two took Litzi by either arm and headed across the cobbles toward a door on the right. My escort took me left, to a dim room where he flicked on a buzzing fluorescent tube, sat me down at a small table, then departed, shutting the door behind him. After waiting five minutes I opened the door, only to find two Vopos on guard.

  “Back inside!” one shouted, but the door was open just long enough for me to hear muffled shouts from the room where they’d taken Litzi. The guards pushed me back inside and slammed the door. My spirits sank further when I heard the groan of a diesel engine and felt a rumble through the floor. Our train was leaving.

  Maybe half an hour passed before the man in the brown coat entered. He shouted an order in an unfamiliar language—Russian?—and a Vopo brought a bottle of mineral water with two glasses. He poured some for himself, lit a cigarette, and watched me for several seconds. Then he addressed me in excellent English with a Prussian accent.

  “That book you are reading, the one by the criminal CIA man, how did you select it?”

  “You pulled us in because of that?”

  “How did you select it?”

  “It’s my father’s. I’m borrowing it. I liked the title.”

  “How many condoms did you bring?”

  “What?”

  “There are a dozen still in your bag. Were you planning to use them all?”

  I shrugged, blushing in spite of myself.

  “Or were you planning to conceal something in them and transport it back into the West in your stomach?”

  “That’s crazy.” Did he really think we were smuggling drugs? Or were they going to plant some on us and haul us off to jail?

  “Why else would you have so many for only two nights more?”

  “They’re cheaper in bulk.”

  He said nothing for a minute or two. He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another. I reached for the water bottle and he didn’t stop me. It was a cheap local brand, gassy and harsh, but it calmed me.

  “Your father, he is a diplomat?”

  He gave special emphasis to the final word, as if it were a pejorative term, or an outright falsehood.

  “Yes.”

  He smirked.

  “In that case, you may think of me as a diplomat as well.” He snorted under his breath. “What else does he like to read? More things like this Hunt trash?”

  “You’d have to ask him. He’s a collector.”

  “I am sure. What are his duties?”

  “At his job?”

  “Of course at his job. Do you know of any special duties?”

  “No.”

  “You are sure of this? Do not lie to me.”

  “Yes. I’m sure.”

  “Has he not asked you to do his bidding while you are in the German Democratic Republic?”

  “His bidding?”

  “Observing things. Then reporting back to him, once you are home.”

  “He didn’t even know I was coming.”

  “Yes, that is a useful story for you, I am sure.” He smiled smugly. I’ve never been a violent person, but at that moment I wanted to lunge across the table and grab him by the neck. He stared awhile longer and then, as if he’d suddenly grown bored, he stood and left without a word. A Vopo reentered, took away the bottle, and shut the door.

  I had no idea what had prompted his questions, which at the time only seemed bizarre. In light of recent events I now wonder if “special duties” was a reference to my father’s courier errands. Had Dad been under surveillance? And why were they interested in my father’s books?

  The fellow in the brown coat must have concluded I had little to offer, because he never returned. Litzi was another matter. He spent the next ninety minutes grilling her. By the time she finally emerged, just after a Vopo escorted me onto the platform, she was hugging herself for either warmth or comfort.

  “Are you all right?” I asked. I stepped toward her, but a Vopo held us apart. “Litzi, are you okay? Did he—?”

  Sniffling, she shook her head as if to reassure me, but she looked pale and frightened.

  Another Vopo brought our bags. I later discovered that the condoms were gone. They also took the Hunt novel.

  They bundled us into the back of a rattling Wartburg that was idling in front of the station. The driver was a civilian in disheveled clothes. A second car followed us for a few miles, then peeled away toward Bad Schandau. Neither Litzi nor I spoke during the forty-minute ride to Dresden. We didn’t know if the driver was a plainclothesman or some hack they’d hired off the street. He, too, remained silent. Now and then I glanced at Litzi, but she was invariably gazing out her window.

  The driver dropped us at the Dresden Hauptbahnhof, more than two hours after we would have arrived by train. He sped away without asking for a fare, our gift from the German Democratic Republic. Litzi sagged into my arms.

  “What did they do?” I asked. “Why did they keep you for so long?”

  “The usual harassment,” she said. “I’m an Austrian national with a Czech father, so they have to take their pound of flesh.”

  That was when I first learned that Litzi’s last name hadn’t always been Strauss. Her dad had chosen it after switching from Marek. He had grown up in Bohemia, a Czech national who’d fled to Vienna during the Second World War and t
hen somehow managed to stay once the Soviets began repatriating all East Bloc nationals, just like they did with Harry Lime’s girlfriend Anna in The Third Man. No wonder Litzi didn’t like the movie.

  “They can’t deport him,” I said. “Not now.”

  “Not legally, no.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t want to talk about them anymore. And I don’t want to stay in Dresden any longer than we have to. I want to get to Berlin. West Berlin.”

  She refused to say more about the ordeal. I’ve always assumed she would eventually have loosened up over time, but my dad and I left Vienna three weeks later, so I never found out.

  From Dresden, Litzi and I caught an early train the next morning to Berlin, and spent the day moping around its sights and its museums before boarding our reserved overnight compartment for Vienna. Litzi was still in too much of a daze for us to enjoy the ride the way we’d hoped.

  Our families were furious, but they let us keep seeing each other during my final weeks in town. But the jolt of the experience cast a pall over our last days together, and even seemed to darken our correspondence afterward. For a few months we gamely lived up to our promises to write regularly, but never achieved quite the spark we’d had in Vienna. By the time I started traveling to the States to pick a college, we had stopped as if by mutual consent. Then we lost touch.

  Now here we were again, seated in the Bräunerhof at the very table where we’d hatched our first big adventure. And damned if we weren’t planning another one.

  “You’re sure you want to go through with this?” I asked.

  “Of course.” Neither of us was smiling now.

  I checked my watch.

  “Time to go.”

  “Moscow Rules,” she muttered. “Hope that that doesn’t mean we’ll see the man in the brown coat.”

  “Oh, I hope it does. He owes me a dozen condoms.”

  She laughed, but only briefly. Then she tightened her grip on my arm.

  13

  Köllnerhofgasse was a bustling little street. Number 11 was the most run-down building on the block. The lock on the main doorway was broken, and the stairwell stank of mildew and pigeon shit.