The Double Game

by Dan Fesperman

  “Yes.”

  “There’s an old storage area there, sort of like a cavern. It’s usually locked up at night, but I presume Jan has a key. Karel and I used to play there. We’d jimmy the gate and run wild. It was always dark and damp, nothing much to see except empty beer kegs and a few parked cars, but we thought it was great and we called it the Cave. Winos always took dumps beneath the overhang just outside, so Jan better watch his step.”

  Once Karel and I had taken a flashlight. The flitting beam and the shadows it created had made the Cave even eerier. The most remarkable sight was the dripping far wall, a mossy embankment of stones that held back the river. In the deep silence you could hear the throb of the passing current.

  “There he is.”

  Jan reached the sidewalk and glanced both ways. He looked vulnerable down there, an easy target, and for a moment I felt bad about sending him ahead of us.

  “Who’s that?” Litzi said, pointing to the right.

  A figure had just emerged from the shadows and then stopped. In the light of the streetlamp I saw a flash of metal, which made me flinch until I realized it was a leash.

  “Somebody walking a dog,” I said. “A woman.”

  Not that women walking dogs weren’t necessarily connected to this scheme, as I already knew firsthand. But this one soon took herself out of the picture.

  Jan reached the end of the park, shoulders hunched against the wind. He turned the corner and headed down the sloping cobbles toward the mouth of the Cave. No one else was in sight. More fat raindrops began to fall.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “Wait any longer and we’ll get soaked.”

  We caught up to him without incident. He was trying to scrape something off the sole of his shoe, and the opening stank to high heaven. Piles of human shit were coiled outside the gate, just like in the old days. The rickety chain-link cover of my youth had been replaced by a sturdy aluminum grid, but otherwise little had changed. From what I could see in the gloom there were still only kegs and cars inside, although now the models were Mercedes and BMWs.

  Jan shoved open the gate.

  “Here,” he said, tossing me the car keys. “I’m not supposed to go in. The car is yours for one day only. Return it here.”

  The key fob had a Mercedes logo. When I pressed a button, a horn beeped and a set of yellow parking lights flashed from deep inside.

  Jan turned to go, presumably content to leave the gate open for the rest of the night.

  “Where are we supposed to take it?” I called after him.

  He kept walking, hands in pockets as he rose briskly up the incline and disappeared to the right. I looked back at Litzi, who shrugged. We picked our way to the car, the dome lights showing the way. It was a Mercedes S450 sedan with German tags from Hamburg. But, as I later discovered, there were no ownership papers. There was a folder on the driver’s seat along with a folded road map, a set of printed directions, and a hand-drawn diagram.

  “For Mr. William Furse” was printed across the top of the directions.

  “Furse?” Litzi said. “Is that a mistake?”

  “Probably my code name for the evening. William Furse was a character in The Double Game.”

  “And what became of him?”

  “Nothing, thank goodness. He even showed up in a later book, still in one piece.”

  “How refreshing.”

  “Do you know anything about checking brakes?” I asked.

  “To see if they’re working?”

  “Or if they’ve been tampered with.”

  She shook her head.

  Neither did I. I got out anyway and crouched on the ground to peer beneath the car, hoping to see if anything looked cut, or leaky, or was dangling from the undercarriage. But it was too dark to see a thing, so I brushed off my knees and climbed back in.

  “Well?”

  “I’ll try them out once we’re under way. Maybe I’ll go a little slower for a while.”

  “In Prague traffic that shouldn’t be a problem.”

  I opened the folder.

  The first thing I saw was a page from the le Carré novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Written atop it in the familiar block lettering was a name, Valerie Humphries. Part of the novel was marked off below. The passage introduced one of my favorite of le Carré’s minor characters—Connie Sachs, the crusty maven of records and research for British Intelligence. She was famous for her encyclopedic memory and attention to detail, especially with regard to anyone who had ever even winked at the KGB, or operated within their sphere of influence—including those chosen few who she enjoyed referring to as “Moscow Centre hoods.” She drank heavily, played favorites, scorned the dolts who ran the Circus, and was thoroughly, girlishly devoted to the brilliant and beleaguered George Smiley.

  Litzi read the paragraphs over my shoulder.

  “She sounds like an alcoholic. Is that what this Humphries woman is like?”

  “Maybe. Why don’t you Google her? While you’re at it, shoot a message to my father. See what he can find out about the email address for K-Fresh 62.”

  Litzi pulled out her smartphone and got to work while I studied the map and the directions, which pointed us onto a tangle of highways that led out of the city, then into the countryside before we were supposed to turn onto a dirt driveway from a rural road some forty miles northwest of Prague. Our destination was up in the hills where farmers grew hops for all that pilsner, and where their forebears had built castles like the one Kafka put in his novel.

  The diagram depicted what seemed to be a farming estate, with a long, winding driveway that snaked past a barn and several outbuildings before reaching a rectangular house beside a pond. Presumably this was where we’d find Valerie Humphries. Whether she would be glad to see us was another matter.

  “We’re going to have to leave this cave before I can get a signal,” Litzi said.

  “At your service.”

  I turned the key. A hundred thousand euros’ worth of German engineering hummed to life, answering the throb of the river.

  “I hope old Valerie keeps late hours. The way I figure it, we won’t get there until almost ten. Maybe by then one of Dad’s buddies will have figured out who my handler is from that email address.”

  “How do you knows she’s old?”

  “Well, if she’s at all like Connie Sachs …”

  We eased through the open gate. At the top of the incline I rolled down the windows for fresh air. I glanced around for any cars waiting to follow us. Seeing none, I accelerated.

  “You navigate,” I said. Litzi picked up the map.

  No sooner had we turned onto the boulevard alongside the river than the heavens opened, and within seconds, rain was sheeting the windshield. Even with the wipers at full tilt, the night was a watery blur. The brakes seemed fine. So far.

  Traffic inched along in the downpour, but Litzi kept us entertained by reading aloud from an old Newsweek story from 1994 that she found online. Headlined “The Lady Takes Down a Tramp,” it was an insider account of how a Humphries-led research team had helped expose the traitorous CIA agent Hamilton Hargraves. And of course the story couldn’t resist comparing her to le Carré’s Connie Sachs.

  “Ninety-four,” I said. “Twenty years too late for Jim Angleton. I wonder if she’s old enough to have met him before he was sacked.”

  Litzi scrolled through the text.

  “He’s not mentioned. But the story says she was fifty-seven, definitely old enough.”

  “Meaning now she’s seventy-three. Hope she still has all her marbles.”

  “Why send you to see her? Couldn’t your handler have talked to her just as easily?”

  “Maybe she’s come up with something new that she’ll only discuss in person. Or maybe it’s just to further my education, so I’ll know what to do next. As long as she’s not another fake Russian, that will be an improvement.”

  The rain slackened as we reached the outskirts of the city, then fell harder as we eased into
the darkness of the countryside. We missed a turn, getting lost enough that we had to backtrack ten miles, and by the time we finally pulled onto the gravel driveway it was nearly ten-thirty. The rural night was black behind its screen of rain, and the country lane was so rutted and mushy that once I nearly got stuck, fishtailing the rear wheels. Finally our beams lit the walls of a two-story stone farmhouse with a pitched shingle roof. There were four mullioned windows across the front of each floor, but only one was lit, downstairs and to the right. There was a separate garage with both doors shut, so we parked in the mush and sprinted for the door.

  An overflowing gutter cascaded across the front. We took shelter on a small porch and I knocked loudly. An outside light came on, one of those yellow bulbs for keeping away bugs. A deadbolt slid back before the door eased free.

  Any illusion I’d had of meeting a dissipated old drunk, gone to seed like Connie, was immediately dispelled. Valerie Humphries was in remarkable shape, her posture upright, every silver hair in place. But the real surprise was that I recognized her—she was the “Val” from the funeral on Block Island, the one who’d called Lemaster a “pariah” and had then been talking to Nethercutt’s wife.

  Fortunately, she didn’t seem to recognize me, although she did inspect us both from head to toe. She wore a smart black wool skirt, a cream-colored blouse, and a string of pearls, the kind of older woman my father used to call “well preserved” when he was part of the embassy social scene. I would’ve wagered she dressed like this every night, one of those exacting personalities who demanded as much from herself as from those around her. As she looked us over, she seemed far less impressed with us than we were with her.

  “I suppose you’re Mr. Furse,” she said, employing the code name.

  “Yes. Sorry for the late arrival.”

  “Come in.”

  I introduced Litzi, but changed her last name to Hauptmann. Humphries raised her eyebrows at the first name, and I was pretty sure I knew why.

  “No one warned me about you,” she said to Litzi as she ushered us in. “I can’t say that I enjoy these surprises, but I’m not the one who makes the plans, and never have been. I’d offer you coffee but the cook is asleep, and if I wake him there’ll be hell to pay. Mine is undrinkable, so Burgundy will have to do.”

  “Burgundy would be generous,” I said.

  Especially since, with Connie Sachs, Smiley had to provide all the alcohol. The hard stuff, too, as an inducement to memory.

  The room was comfortable, with low lighting, rich oriental rugs, and warm colors on the walls. There was a book on the couch that she must have been reading, with a Czech title. A scattering of crosswords and number puzzles were piled to the side—done in pen, not pencil. Maybe it was how she kept her mind sharp, although, as I was about to discover, her tongue could be sharper.

  She picked up an open bottle of Burgundy from an end table along with a half-filled glass and led us farther into the house. We came to a sitting room with harsher lighting, white walls, and firmer chairs, as if she was warning us not to get comfortable. Then she fetched two more glasses from a sideboard and poured them full.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Even Dad, far more discerning than I, would have appreciated the vintage, which tasted dusky and complex enough to have some years behind it.

  “How did you end up living here?” Litzi asked.

  Urban Europeans were always curious about Americans who chose to maroon themselves in the Continent’s outback.

  “I married a Czech émigré who worked for the Agency. He always wanted to come back, and after the Velvet Revolution he bought property here. We came over after retiring. I suppose he thought he would become some sort of gentleman farmer. Two years ago he had a heart attack while riding his tractor. It kept rolling, clear across the farm and onto the highway, where it came to rest against an old poplar on the far side of the road. Blocked traffic all afternoon, or I might not have found out for days.”

  She spoke of it rather clinically, as if she’d just been reviewing his file, then she polished off her summation with a sip of Burgundy before turning to Litzi.

  “I don’t mean to be inhospitable, but when you’ve finished your wine you’ll have to leave the house. I’m only prepared to discuss certain matters with people who I know have been cleared for the information, and I won’t have you eavesdropping on me from some other room.”

  Litzi was incredulous. First she looked at me, as if this might be my doing, then looked toward the window, where the rain was still pelting down in the dark.

  “You may use my rain slicker and hat,” Humphries said. “They’re in the closet by the door. You can borrow my Wellington boots as well.” Litzi’s expression changed from surprise to indignation. “If it makes any difference, there are horses in the barn, and you’re welcome to visit them. I say that not just because the barn is warm and dry, but because you look as if you’ve ridden before.”

  Litzi tilted her head, reassessing this straightforward woman.

  “You’re right. I rode quite a lot as a girl.” That was certainly news to me. “I’ll be happy to visit your horses. They’re probably friendlier.”

  “No doubt, my dear.”

  Litzi set down her wine and headed for the exit. Humphries waited while we listened to the creak of a closet door, the shuffle of a rain jacket, the squeak of boots. Finally we heard the front door opening to the sound of the storm. Then it shut with a rattle.

  “Part of your cover, I suppose, but I can’t say I approve.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The girl. And those ridiculous names you’re using. Did they actually think I’d enjoy the joke?”

  “The joke?”

  “Oh, don’t play stupid. Litzi was Philby’s first wife. Furse was his second wife’s maiden name.” That was news to me. Lemaster’s idea of a prank, perhaps. “But the less I know about you, the better. Besides, he sent you, didn’t he?”

  Was this a trick question?

  “Who’s ‘he’?”

  She smiled appreciatively.

  “Good. Exactly how you should answer. And I certainly won’t mention his name, either.”

  For the first time since I’d set out on this quest, I experienced the excitement of having at last brushed up against the source of it all. Not just an email address, but a direct and personal link. Humphries was apparently an old colleague of my handler’s—at least that’s what she seemed to think. She also seemed convinced that I was a CIA man. A professional, not a freelance. Meaning I had better start acting like I knew what I was doing, lest she get suspicious and clam up.

  The rain came harder as a gust of wind shook the windows. I felt a pang of sympathy for Litzi, but it was time to get down to business.

  25

  “She’s jealous, by the way, that girl you’re calling Litzi.”

  It was an odd way for Humphries to begin, but I could hardly let it pass without comment.

  “Jealous of you?”

  She shook her head, frowning at the absurdity.

  “Of you, and of what you know. But she must know things, too. You have to know at least part of the picture to be jealous of those who know the rest. And that’s where your colleague is now. Her face was broadcasting it from the moment you walked in the door.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “From more than forty years of observing other people just like her, in a business where what you knew defined your status. Reading files teaches you to read people, believe it or not.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  I’d brought the folder from the Mercedes, which turned out to be a mistake. She reached over and nimbly snatched it from beside me on the chair. Opening it, she flicked through the pages and sighed when she saw the le Carré passage.

  “Spare me the goddamned Connie Sachs crap, if you don’t mind.”

  “But I didn’t—”

  “No sense in denying it. I can see it in your stupid mooning face, the s
tar-struck look of the devoted reader who thinks he’s finally found the real thing. Well, get it out of your head. The real Connie was some MI5 gal, Millicent Bagot. She died four years ago. Look it up, if that’s what you’re into. But I don’t come from a book, and no one ever wrote me into one. Letting Newsweek write that load of PR rubbish about the Hargraves case was a mistake, but no one asked me, of course. None of the old Agency spooks who wrote novels even knew who I was, and that’s the way I preferred it.”

  “And what did you know about them?”

  “Most of the time I only knew them by their cover names. It helped me stay objective when it came time to evaluate their reports. I briefed a few of them, of course, on paper anyway. Supplied them with all kinds of useful items, which they promptly forgot the moment they were in the field, in favor of their so-called instinct. It’s like when a crop scientist tests the soil to come up with the perfect formula for what to plant and how to tend it, only to have a bunch of stupid plowboys in heavy boots trample everything to mush, thinking they know better. Of course, later, when they’re growing apples where they should have planted peaches, they bitch and moan when everything fails and ask why no one ever warned them. That’s what it was like being in research.”

  She sipped her wine and smoothed her skirt, glaring at me as if I were another blinkered fool who would ignore her advice.

  “So what have you been able to learn?” she asked. “What have you discovered?”

  Whoa, now. Who was supposed to be getting information from this session, my handler or me? Was this going to turn into a face-to-face version of a dead drop, with Humphries reporting my latest findings?

  “I’m the one who’s here for information.”

  “Of course. But I need a reference point. For a researcher, context is everything. I’m not asking you to divulge operational detail, just fill me in on the big picture. And let me warn you now that I plan to be very tight when it comes to divulging actual names. Happy to give them when relevant, but there’s no sense in being fast and loose unless it’s warranted. The rules exist for a reason. Now, where do you stand?”