“I told you then that a fine-looking woman was on your tail.”
So he had. I’d assumed he meant the woman from Georgetown, whom I’d since forgotten all about.
“It was Litzi?”
He nodded, then frowned sympathetically. The beer sloshed coldly in my stomach as I considered the implications. But why should I believe Lothar? Maybe he was trying to mislead me.
“Bullshit.”
“Call and find out for yourself.”
“I’ve tried. She’s not answering.”
“I don’t mean her mobile. Phone her office. Ask where she is, and how long it’s been in the works. I did, just the other day. The answer was illuminating.”
I wasn’t ready for more bad news, but a creeping sense of dread told me it was unavoidable, so I retrieved her business card from my wallet and punched in the number for the Austrian National Library. Lothar polished off his first pint as he watched, then licked the foam from his upper lip.
A man answered on the fourth ring.
“Litzi Strauss, please.”
“She is away on annual leave.”
That didn’t sound very much like the last-minute getaway she’d described to me.
“When will she return?”
“Two weeks more from Monday.”
“Oh. Well, this is an old friend from the States. I’d, uh, heard she’d been called away on short notice, and I was concerned for her.”
“No, no. Her vacation has been scheduled for quite some time. Would you care to leave a message?”
“No, thank you.”
I set down the phone. Scheduled for quite some time. My handler must have arranged for her employment well in advance. If he had security connections, I suppose she would’ve been easy enough to find. As Dad had mentioned, she was probably still listed in some embassy file. For anyone who knew my background, she would have been the perfect choice for keeping tabs on my movements. No wonder I’d only had to deliver information once, by dropping off the photo negatives at a dead drop. Litzi had kept him abreast of everything else. The moment I started shutting her out, she quit. I should’ve heeded my earlier doubts. Instead, I’d kept on making a fool of myself. Maybe fifty-three was the age when, despite all your best efforts at maintenance and perseverance, everything began to crumble. Your knees, your waistline, your judgment. And now my optimism. If I’d hoped this enterprise would offer some payback for my previous mistakes, then the check had just bounced.
“Stop feeling so damn sorry for yourself. We’ve got a pitcher to finish. While you’re at it, take the battery out of your cell phone, and next time you’re out and about, buy a disposable one with a virgin SIM card. Your handler’s tools are obsolete, and so are yours, including that silly webcam. That means every other interested party in this affair has the jump on you. And, believe me, they’re out there, with encryption software, signal tracing, data mining, and satellite imagery. All you’ve got is a lot of quaint tricks from every novel you ever read as a boy. If you’re going to keep doing this, then you’d better start playing by newer rules than your handler’s.”
“I just hope my handler’s working for the right side. Sometimes I think he might even be working for Moscow.”
“Now that’s a laugh. Don’t worry, he’s American to the core.”
“How do you know so much about him?”
“Because he was my handler, too, once upon a time.”
I almost choked in midswallow. Lothar watched me wipe the beer from my chin while the news sank in.
“The Agency hired you?”
“It was a contract job. To track down this courier network Ed had supposedly engineered. A renegade transaction from start to finish. That’s why your movements intrigued me from the start, and why I’ve been following you ever since. I want to know why history is repeating itself. The same deliveries. The same contacts. The same old people doing the same old things they used to do, except now there’s no one left at the end of the line to receive all those messages that were once handled with such exquisite care.”
“No Dewey, you mean?”
“No Dewey, and no super-paranoid Jim Angleton hovering over everything like a malign cloud, although I’d wager his ghost is watching us with great perturbation.”
“Who is he, then?”
“Our handler?”
I nodded. He laughed.
“That’s the sort of information that must be earned. And you’re a long way from earning it.”
“You said you were here to straighten me out.”
“To a point. I want to help you, but not the jackass who’s running you. So for the moment I’m taking baby steps and watching your back. When I’m able to, of course. I still have my own affairs to attend to.”
“I guess this is how you know I’ll be heading to Budapest next.”
“Antikvárium Szondi. Except it’s no longer on Corvin Square. Try the row of bookshops along Museum Boulevard. I tracked you there once, when you were just a boy.”
“Me?”
It was an odd sensation, imagining a much younger Lothar shadowing a much younger me along mysterious streets that had gone fuzzy in my memory. It stirred an odd lightness in the hollow of my chest. Then skepticism took over.
“My father said he never used me for Dewey deliveries.”
“Never knowingly. In that sense he’s telling you the truth.”
“How would he not know?”
“The name Dewey wouldn’t even come up, although I think it’s the only code name the Agency ever got wind of, and Lemaster wouldn’t have made the request. Your dad probably thought he was doing a favor for the bookseller, or for some other friend. By the time this network was operating at its peak, people were doing things on Ed Lemaster’s behalf without the slightest clue of who they were assisting. That was the beauty of it. Even your friend Karel’s father made a delivery once.”
“Source Fishwife. Is that why you spoke to him?”
“Posing as a security policeman, of course. I think he was convinced I was with the Russians. Even with my German accent, in those days all you had to say to a Czech was ‘secret police’ and they would tell you anything. At one point Ed’s network got so busy that I even asked poor old Bruzek to begin keeping a ledger of related transactions. Not directly, of course, that would’ve blown my cover. So I chose a cutout, who in turn paid a certain young boy whom I had selected in advance to make the phone call, repeating my message word for word.”
Lothar smiled as he watched that sink in.
“So you used me, too.”
“How could I resist? You were an absolute star of a courier. Reliable, punctual, rain or shine. And tireless on the cobbles, like Zátopek. Over in Buda once, you scampered up that steep hill by the tramway so fast that it damn near killed me. But of course I had vices then. And I was smoking, a pack a day.”
“I’m so relieved you gave up your vices. What made the Agency desperate enough to hire a drugged-out book scout?”
“They were less desperate than you think. I’d trained for the game once, which I’m sure they knew. I just never made it through finishing school.”
“The Farm?”
Lothar shook his head.
“MI6. They needed Germans in those days, especially Berliners. So they took me up to Hamburg and taught me all kinds of tricks, plus a lot of hocus-pocus. As someone smarter than me once said, they crammed two weeks of intense training into three months of crashing boredom.
“And, let’s face it, landing a top-notch book scout was a plus for them. They were already pretty sure this courier network was being run through a string of antiquarian shops and sellers, which meant I was equipped with the perfect contacts and the perfect cover. On both sides of the Iron Curtain. And I was already acquainted with Ed and his literary shopping habits.”
“Then why does our handler have me retracing your steps?”
“Because I never filed my report. Not the final one, anyway, the one with the best stuff. I was
deep into smack by then, and not the most reliable fellow about dead drops and deadlines. So, at some point after I’d been AWOL for a week or two, he’d had enough. Traveled clear across the Atlantic to fire me, then demanded to see all my work. I told him to fuck off and vowed he’d never get a single line out of me unless I was paid in full, plus a bonus—my habit was quite expensive by then—and, well, he answered in kind. He must have thought I was bluffing.”
“But you weren’t?”
“Not in the least. But by the time he realized that, his grand inquisitor, Jim Angleton, had been sacked and Lemaster was a best-selling author already out the door. So everything sort of faded into the background. Until now, for whatever reason, when our dear handler seems to be giving it one last go and has anointed you as the new Lothar. From what I’ve seen of your work, I can’t imagine why.”
“Join the club. Neither can I.”
“You’re cheap. That’s one thing. That fake Russian he had following you ought to tell you something about his limited resources. I suppose he also appreciates that you know the books inside out. Otherwise you’re completely unqualified, meaning he’s desperate.”
“Well, if you really want to improve my job performance, just brief me on what you found out.”
“Why? So you can give him everything, free of charge? Besides”—and here he smiled coyly—“all that information is readily available in painstaking detail. You need only read it.”
He let me consider that for a second. After another swallow of beer, I had it.
“Your novel. You put everything into your novel.”
“It seemed like the best way to bring it to life. If he wouldn’t pay me, then I’d give it to the world, which could reimburse me copy by copy. I found a small press in Frankfurt that was very eager to publish. A shitty advance, but hopes were high.”
“What happened?”
“What do you think? Some asshole in Langley got wind of it before the ink was dry on the galleys. Even in the early seventies it wasn’t all that hard for the Occupation Powers to quash something like that if they deemed it sufficiently dangerous. They even broke into my apartment. Took every copy of my manuscript, and of course back then there were no CD-ROMs or memory sticks.”
“But you said there were galleys.”
“Very good. You do pay attention.”
“How many?”
“Twenty-five. As I said, it was a small press. They only printed enough for reviewers at a select cadre of German dailies and magazines, but the copies had all been mailed out the day before the order came down, so my publisher sent out a recall notice.”
“Were they all returned?”
“Twenty-four were. But in Heidelberg some enterprising subeditor with a habit worse than mine had already sold it to a secondhand dealer, along with a boxful of other publisher freebies. He was so pharmaceutically addled that he couldn’t remember who’d paid him. And by then, of course, the Agency’s single best source on how to track down obscure book titles—the one person who might have found it—was persona non grata.”
“You.”
“Of course.”
“So you still have it?”
“Absolutely not. I knew my apartment would be the first place they’d look, and the one place they’d keep looking, year after year, or until they got tired of rifling through my shelves and pulling up floorboards. I decided it would be far safer in its original location. Or, rather, the location where it ended up, a few harmless transactions later.”
“You bought it back, then resold it to some more obscure vendor.”
“I made special arrangements, let’s put it that way. Sometimes it’s safest to hide in plain sight.”
“Well, that’s a big help.”
He shrugged, unmoved.
“It’s not somewhere you’ve never been, I will say that.”
“Seeing as how my dad must have dragged me into a zillion bookstores all over Europe, I’m not sure that’s a big help.”
“Then you’ll have to think like a book scout, that is, like a spy. Or, at least, like the only kind of spy that seems to appeal to you and me—the old-fashioned kind. Low-tech and low to the ground, surviving on his wits. And I promise you this. If you do find it, come to me first, and I’ll tell you his name.”
“My handler’s?”
“Our handler’s. Then you’ll know why you should never hand him the information.”
“So, two people are dead, and you’re making a game out of it, too?”
“You’ve read the books. When has it not been a game? And when have the stakes ever been anything other than life or death?”
“Tell that to Bruzek’s nephew, Anton.”
“Poor old Bruzek. A greedy bastard, but he didn’t deserve that. Got a little careless in his old age, I suppose.”
“Then why haven’t they killed me? God knows I’ve been careless at times.”
“At times? Don’t flatter yourself. They don’t want to kill you. Not yet. Because they want you to succeed. They’re after the same thing you are, and they’re hoping you’ll lead them to it. Finding it is what will put you in mortal danger. Unless of course you lead them to something in the meantime that will allow them to figure it out for themselves. Then you’ll be equally disposable.”
“How will I know what that is?”
“You won’t. Which reminds me, you still haven’t removed the battery from your phone.”
I pulled the phone from my pocket and grudgingly popped out the battery.
“Here’s something else I don’t understand,” I said. “Why does this all have to be so damn complicated? The clues, the step-by-step instructions. Why can’t my handler—our handler—just tell me what he knows and what he wants me to find out?”
“Oh, c’mon. That’s the nature of the business. To hoard information and only dole it out on a need-to-know basis. To keep your operatives in the dark for as long as possible, if only to limit your own vulnerability. I always used to laugh whenever some stupid book critic complained about how byzantine Ed’s plots are, or whined that they had to peel away the meaning layer by layer, like an onion. If they only knew. The real thing is twice as complicated. And the layers? More like those fragile ones on a Greek pastry. The instant you try peeling one away, it crumbles in your fingers, until eventually you’re left with nothing.”
“That’s the way I feel about Lemaster sometimes, like he’s crumbling away to nothing. The more I find out about what he did, the less I learn about him.”
“You and everyone who knew him. For Ed, the best part of every relationship was the courtship. He enjoyed luring people into his orbit, and he had all the necessary tools—intelligence, wit, charm. Warmth, to a point. But his real knack was for knowing which piece of himself to put forth for your initial inspection. With your father it was his fascination with books. With me, our brand of Continental politics, the way we saw the world. But it was like he had a built-in thermostat, set to switch off whenever a friendship warmed to a certain level. You’d realize all of a sudden that he’d gone cold on you, even though he was still taking everything you had to offer.”
“Sounds like part of his tradecraft.”
“Possibly. But I think it came naturally. Maybe it’s the only way he knows how to be.”
“What piece did he give you? You said politics.”
“I was going through my ‘Don’t trust America’ phase, and Ed played right along, even though he knew I was aware of what he did for a living. He wasn’t too thrilled with what his country was becoming. The longer he stayed overseas, the more he became a European.”
“That sounds more like my dad than somebody who’d write those flag-wavers he’s been churning out lately.”
“Nobody was more surprised than me when Ed moved back across the water. And those recent novels?” Lothar shook his head.
“You think he does it to steal their secrets?”
“Possibly. Or maybe it’s just how he entertains himself now. Gain their
trust, find out how they live, work, and play, then write them as caricatures while making a bundle into the bargain.”
The remark reminded me of what Lemaster had told me about the appeal of being a double agent—“to just walk through the looking glass and find out how they really lived on the other side—well, isn’t that the secret dream of every spy?”
Had that been more than just a motivation for spying—his blueprint for life, perhaps? I was silent for a moment. So was Lothar. Then he downed the last of his beer, licked his lips, and leaned across the table.
“Down to business. Now that you’re no longer carrying a homing beacon in your pocket, here’s how I would like you to proceed to the train station. After the way you’ve been blundering about, maybe a sudden burst of old-style tradecraft will actually catch them by surprise. If so, it might buy you a day or two without pursuit. With luck, that’s all you’ll need.”
He proceeded to outline a complicated sequence of tram rides, switched taxis, and brisk walks through crowded stores that would eventually take me to the train station. Then he checked his watch.
“You can still make the three-seventeen.” He handed me the plainest business card I’ve ever seen. No name, no title, no address. Just a number for a cell phone, written across the middle.
“To be used only in an emergency,” he said. “Ask for Heinz.”
“As in Klarmann.”
“Good. You’re not completely hopeless.”
He put a few crown notes on the table, then picked up his cane and stood to leave.
“Your life as a more polished operative, of the sort that might once have made Richard Folly proud, begins now,” he said.
I gathered up my bag, checked the bill to make sure he had left enough for both of us, then turned to say good-bye. But Lothar, who had been playing at this far longer than I, was already gone.
29
I hadn’t been to Budapest since I was eleven. My three years there were like a mirage, quivering on the horizon of that long-ago era before girlfriends, running, and the imaginary worlds within Dad’s books.
It was the one European home that initially felt foreign to me, probably because we moved there after our two years in Washington. To a kid fresh out of America the city was old and oppressive, smelling of coal smoke and cabbage. The cars were clunky. The boys wore boxy shorts and bad haircuts. Television flickered with unfamiliar faces speaking a harsh new tongue, and none seemed half as welcoming as Jackie Gleason or even Ed Sullivan.
The Double Game Page 25
