The Double Game

by Dan Fesperman

  “He doesn’t like unexpected visitors.”

  “Maybe you could ask him for me. My name’s Bill Cage. My father is Warfield Cage. He sent me here.”

  His eyes flashed in recognition at the mention of Dad’s name.

  “I am pleased to meet you,” he said. “I am Anton. Wait here.”

  He disappeared into the back. I listened for voices but heard only footsteps on a stairway, which soon faded into the depths of the store. Litzi surveyed the room.

  “Wave to him,” she said.

  I followed her gaze to a security camera mounted near the ceiling.

  “You really think he’s watching?” I spoke out the side of my mouth.

  “Of course.”

  She stared defiantly. I looked away. A few seconds later I heard footsteps. Anton reappeared.

  “He said to come up. But not for long. His health is not the best.”

  We both started out across the room, but Anton stopped us.

  “Not her. Just you.”

  “That’s fine.”

  I said it a little too eagerly. Trust was definitely an issue, and the worst part was that I’m sure Litzi had begun to notice, so I tried to soften the blow.

  “It will probably be easier to get him to talk if there’s just one of us.”

  She didn’t reply.

  I followed Anton upstairs, then down a hall into the next building over, where we turned toward the back and climbed a second flight before again moving right and toward the rear. The scuffed old floors were warped and uneven, the air close and stale. At the end of the last passage the door opened onto a large room with a desk to one side and, at the far end, a daybed beneath a mullioned picture window overlooking a small green courtyard. Václav Bruzek was propped against a stack of pillows on the daybed. Papers were scattered in his lap, and a bowl of blueberries sat to his right. A cup of coffee, no longer steaming, sat on an end table atop a pile of books. The windowpanes were streaked and cloudy, and dead insects were scattered along the sill like knickknacks. I didn’t know if Bruzek was lying down by choice or necessity, but his color was reasonably good, his hair was combed, and his eyes were clear.

  Anton departed without a word, shutting the door behind him. Bruzek stared at me for a few seconds, then glanced toward the wall at the foot of the bed, where a mounted black-and-white video screen displayed Litzi, arms folded. I half expected her to wave. Her instincts for this sort of thing were a little unnerving.

  “Who’s the girl?” Bruzek asked. “She’s certainly not American.”

  “Litzi Strauss, from Vienna.” I felt an obligation to establish her credentials, so I added, “She’s an archivist,” but Bruzek seemed unmoved. “She’s also an old friend.”

  He took another look at her, squinting now.

  “Strauss like the composer? She’s no Strauss. Bohemian is my guess.” He dipped into the blueberries with a gnarled right hand and tossed a few into his mouth, talking as he chewed. “This was never your father’s style, to travel in pairs. He did his own legwork. You have his eyes. His mouth, too. But obviously not his deliberation.”

  “What kind of legwork?” If Bruzek could skip the polite preliminaries, so could I.

  “This is for a magazine, you said?”

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Enter.”

  Anton brought in a tray with two flowered china cups and a fresh pot of tea. He whisked away the old mug of coffee and set down the tray. Bruzek poured two cups, which lured me across the room. I took a seat in a creaking office chair at the foot of the bed.

  “Yes,” I said. “Vanity Fair.”

  “Anton said you’re writing about the old days, but that doesn’t tell me very much.”

  “It’s a story about Ed Lemaster. About his CIA career.”

  Bruzek raised an eyebrow as he stirred in a heap of sugar.

  “Do you have a business card?”

  “No, I’m a freelancer. But I do have a letter of introduction.”

  I got it out of my pocket. By now it was creased and wrinkled. Bruzek smoothed it in his lap, frowning at its condition in a way that only a keeper of old papers would do.

  “If you plan on using this much longer you should have it laminated.”

  He handed it back. Then, with a grimace and a groan, he worked himself into a more upright position.

  “Please help me stand. I would feel much more comfortable speaking to you from behind my desk.”

  I took his arm and helped him across the room to a ladder-back chair behind a huge mahogany desk. Behind it was a high wall of bookshelves, stuffed full and leaning slightly, as if they might fall at any moment. Someone needed to shim them up. Bruzek was light but still wiry, and once he was on his feet he was surprisingly steady. I retrieved his teacup.

  “I’ll be fine now. Pull your chair over.”

  We settled into our new positions, and I saw right away why he’d requested the move. His chair was set high, mine low. He was now looking down at me, a surprisingly commanding presence for a man his age. He placed his arms on the desk and laced his fingers together, a pose of patience and calm.

  “Well?” he said. “I presume you have questions.”

  “Tell me how you first got to know Ed Lemaster. As a customer?”

  “It was the mid-sixties, I can’t give you an exact year. He was quite a collector. Still is, I presume.”

  “Did you know what he did for a living?”

  “He never said.”

  An artful evasion, but Bruzek spoke again before I could follow up.

  “Let’s stop being so coy and genteel, shall we? I assume your father must have told you a few things or he wouldn’t have sent you here, and if your subject is Ed Lemaster, then you’re probably interested in his system for relaying messages. That was my only real role in his work. All those parcels for Dewey, correct?”

  I wondered why he’d come to the point so readily—not that I was complaining.

  “Who set it up?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It wasn’t Ed?”

  Bruzek shrugged.

  “Well, yes or no?”

  “No. Not directly. It was someone acting on his behalf. Ed had introduced us a few weeks earlier, during a buying trip. The next time the fellow showed up, it was to talk about the setup, and how it would work. ‘A friend,’ that’s all Ed ever called him, so I don’t have a name. But he paid well and he paid promptly, and his instructions were simple and clear. Every delivery was always for Dewey, and I was always to call the courier to make the pickup. What happened afterward I have no idea. Who it went to? No idea. What purpose it ultimately served? No idea.”

  “Well, you must be able to recall something about this fellow. Was he American?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so, but it wasn’t clear.”

  “Oh, c’mon.”

  “I’m telling you the truth. He was fairly nondescript. He was well dressed but nothing flashy or very expensive. No labels or obvious brands. No watch that I could see. He didn’t smoke, so there was no brand of cigarettes to give him away.” Bruzek had obviously given this matter some thought, which made me inclined to trust his answer. “He always spoke Czech with me. Not as a native, but fluently. His accent was indeterminate, almost as if he’d gone to school in many different places while he was growing up.”

  Like me, I thought. Austrians always had trouble placing the accent on my German. Or, for that matter, like Bruzek, whose excellent English had a mixture of inflections, but sounded different from the way most Czechs spoke it.

  “Was my dad the only courier?”

  “No.”

  “Who else?”

  “That information is not readily available.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that to be sure of its accuracy I would have to look it up, and I am not prepared to do so.”

  “Are you saying you kept records of these transactions?”

  He sco
wled and picked a piece of lint off his shirt. He replied without looking up.

  “Only because someone asked me to.”

  “Do you still have them?”

  He flicked the lint away. We watched it drift to the floor like a tiny parachute.

  “Do I look like a man who throws things away?”

  Bruzek spread his arms to encompass the room, which in its clutter was a miniature version of the store. The high shelves behind him, I noticed, were filled with titles in all languages. Many looked centuries old.

  “No,” I said, “you don’t.”

  “Not that any of the information I logged ever seemed important. Just dates and times, a few names and phone numbers, all of it recorded in a ledger. A chore for which I was never paid, by the way.”

  “You were supposed to be paid?”

  “A substantial sum. That was the promise. Of course, if you would finally like to make good on this promise on behalf of your country, I’m certain I could arrange to acquire it for you.”

  “The CIA requested this?”

  “That was my assumption.”

  “How substantial was the sum?”

  “Calculating for inflation, I would put its current value at …” He looked at the ceiling while his mind ran the numbers. “At least five thousand euros.”

  “Out of my price range. But helping me with this story might make it easier for you to find a buyer.”

  He frowned, then got the gist of it.

  “I see what you mean. By creating an embarrassment for them. A welshed deal to an important Cold War contact.”

  “Why do you think it was the Agency?”

  He shrugged, uncomfortable with the question.

  “Maybe it is not wise to talk so openly of these things, even now.”

  He pushed back his chair, putting some distance between us, and in doing so he bumped the shelves, which creaked and swayed alarmingly, a Babel tower of books that seemed ready to topple at the slightest touch. I instinctively braced my hands against the arms of my chair, ready to leap to safety. Bruzek smiled and didn’t budge.

  “No need to panic. These shelves have been like that for years, hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles. But the books are my children. They would never do me harm.”

  I tried to steer things back on track.

  “Did Ed’s ‘friend’ make the request that you keep the ledger?”

  “No. It was done through another channel. A phone call.”

  “Wasn’t that kind of risky in those times?”

  “Yes. But the wording of the message was very vague.”

  “Did you recognize the voice?”

  “No, no. Whoever the contact was obviously used someone else to make the call for him.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because the voice was that of a child. A boy. He must have been paid to deliver the message, and probably didn’t have the slightest idea what it meant. He might even have done it for free. In those days, being requested by a stranger to place an anonymous phone call would have been too daring and exotic for any boy in Prague to resist. My own son would have done it. So it could have been anyone.”

  As Bruzek spoke, something cold and prickly began creeping up my spine, like a droplet of sweat defying gravity. When the sensation reached the space between my shoulder blades, I felt the hair stand up on the nape of my neck. I leaned forward.

  “Do you remember the wording of the message?” I held my breath for his answer.

  “Oh, yes. When that much money is mentioned, you don’t forget the slightest detail. The call came to me at home. I was alone. It was a Friday, and my wife and son were at the cinema, some awful Stalinist film about the heroic fight against the Germans. This boy’s voice came on the line sounding like he was trying not to laugh.

  “ ‘Václav,’ he said—he never once used my last name—‘Václav, you are instructed to keep a ledger of all particulars for all future deliveries. Payment tenfold upon completion.’ Meaning tenfold of my usual take for each transaction, that was my assumption. So of course I complied.”

  By now the coldness was creeping back down my spine.

  “But no one ever paid you?”

  “Because no one ever came to pick up the ledger.”

  “Would you show it to me?”

  He paused again, shaking his head but not refusing. Then he grimaced, wavering.

  “How about tomorrow?”

  “I can see it then?”

  “I’ll have an answer for you. No promises. I must think about this. But I can tell you for sure tomorrow. Come after hours, seven o’clock. No, make it eight, after dark. These kinds of things should not be revealed by the light of day, don’t you think?”

  He stood slowly, and I did the same. At his shift of weight, the ominous shelves groaned and creaked. Or maybe I was just feeling the effects of what he’d told me.

  “Shall I call Anton to show you out?”

  “I know the way.”

  My steps on the narrow stairways felt stiff, wooden, as if I was descending into a dream. The feeling persisted all the way to the front of the store, where Litzi was still waiting and Anton stood behind the register. She must have read the emotions in my face.

  “What’s wrong?” she said. “What happened up there?”

  “He has more information, but he wants a day to think about it. I’m—we’re—supposed to come back tomorrow night at eight.”

  “What kind of information?”

  “Details about courier transactions. Could be nothing, could be everything.”

  I withheld the biggest revelation, telling myself it was to keep Anton from overhearing. In retrospect, I’m not sure I was ready to tell Litzi, either, not until I’d had time to digest it.

  Because I was the boy who had phoned Bruzek. I had read the message straight from a typewritten page that had been handed to me by a stranger who paid me fifty crowns. The stranger was no one notable, probably just a cutout. I had no idea who I was phoning, of course, and at the time I was convinced it was yet another of those small errands that had somehow been engineered by my father, in his role as a bit player on the fringes of CIA intrigue. Now I wasn’t sure what to think.

  We stepped into the street, where I was momentarily blinded by sunlight.

  “What’s our next stop?” Litzi asked. “Are you still planning to go on the offensive?”

  I blinked, still emerging from the fog of disbelief.

  “What? Oh, yes. Right. Later, if it’s possible.”

  Deep memories, once they’ve been pulled from the muck, sometimes churn up enough old sediment to reveal other buried recollections, as long as you’re patient. And by reliving that old phone call I had now remembered something else, an item that had probably been working its way to the surface ever since I’d seen my old address, 22 Divadelni, typed on a sheet of my stationery the night before. That, in turn, had just given me an idea for a possible preemptive action, a means of indeed taking the offensive.

  “Where to, then?” Litzi sounded impatient, but now I had an answer for her.

  “An old monument called Kranner’s Fountain,” I said. “I’m going to do a little illegal climbing, and you’re going to be my spotter.”

  23

  Kranner’s Fountain with its grim medieval figures peered out at the Vltava River from a small park just across Divadelni Street from my old apartment building. Sixteen of the statues looked as if they’d walked straight out of The Canterbury Tales—an archer, a carpenter, a miller, a baker, and so on.

  As a boy I had a prime view of them from our third-floor balcony, and they often featured in my dreams, climbing down from their perches after midnight to roam the square and beckoning me to join them.

  My awestruck regard was probably what led me to boast to Karel one night that the creases and folds of their stone garments would offer the perfect hiding place for something small and valuable. At the time, the topic of spare keys was much on our minds. The Russians were po
ised to invade, and we took the threat personally. What if they seized our homes for billets? How would we retrieve all our stuff?

  Dad had a spare, but he kept it in one of those obvious spots, beneath a flowerpot. Surely the wily Red Army would figure that out in no time. So I swiped it one day and had an extra copy made. Karel did the same at his house. Then, with conspiratorial excitement, we each came up with a hiding place, and mine was Kranner’s Fountain—specifically, beneath the lower hem of the tunic of the horn-blowing hunter, whose face I could see in profile from our front window.

  We cached our treasure by night. I crossed the dewy grass of the silent park and climbed ten feet up the marble barriers to the hunter’s pedestal. Taking the key from my pocket, I groped above his right knee and glued it into place in the recess beneath the hemline with a U.S. commissary wad of Dubble Bubble, precious stuff in those benighted days of bad soap and scratchy toilet paper.

  Was the key still there? Would it still fit the lock? Long shots. But if that failed I had the whole afternoon to come up with a Plan B.

  First I had to figure out how to climb Kranner’s Fountain in the middle of the day without attracting attention. As Litzi and I approached, several older women were walking their dogs on the gravel paths below. A policeman patrolled a nearby corner. But the most alarming sight was the statue itself. It was scrubbed clean of all the soot and grime that had blackened it when I was a boy, and if the cleaners had been thorough, then the gum and key were surely gone. Also, the fountain I’d climbed as a boy was dry, pumps broken. Now it was working. I’d have to get wet.

  Another notable change, if inconsequential to my efforts, was that the city had recently restored the equestrian figure of Emperor Franz Josef I to the chamber atop the monument. He’d been missing in action for more than ninety years, ever since an inflamed citizenry removed him after declaring independence from the Hapsburgs. For those of you interested in portents and omens, this was the same Franz Josef I whose statue stood guard over the dead drop in Vienna’s Burggarten. As Litzi put it, “By the time this is over, he’ll have seen more of what’s going on than that stupid webcam.”

  Litzi put our plan into action by asking the policeman for directions, keeping him occupied while I climbed over the low wall at the bottom, then soaked my shoes as I scaled the next one. I was stronger now than at eleven, but not nearly as agile, so I moved slowly in pulling myself up toward the base of the hunter, who looked younger than ever.