The Double Game

20

“So how did you manage it?” I asked.

We were walking fast, eager to put as much distance as possible between ourselves and the police. Dad and Litzi had barely acknowledged each other, so I was feeling a little awkward.

“Manage what?”

“Getting us out of there.”

“I didn’t even know you were in there until the embassy phoned saying you were about to be released. I take it this was all about the dead Russian?”

“They thought I did it. They found one of my damn books in his apartment.”

They turned toward me as if I’d jerked their heads on a string, faces incredulous.

“Petrovka 38,” I added for Dad’s benefit.

He shook his head but said nothing. A few feet later he stopped abruptly in front of a cafe and gestured toward the door. “In there,” he said, as if it were a pharmacy with just the cure for what ailed us. “Now.”

We followed without a word and took a table toward the rear. He ordered for everyone, reverting to full Dad mode as he dispensed the prescribed medicine-three shots of brandy on a tray. I have to admit, they were therapeutic. The first swallow eased our breathing. The second restored color to our cheeks, although Litzi still hadn’t said a word.

“I suggest you take the next available train,” Dad said. “Reprieves like this don’t always last. While you’re gone I’ll do what I can to sort things out. And, by the way, hello, Litzi. Even under the circumstances, it’s quite a pleasure to see you.”

She smiled thinly, but some of the tension went out of her shoulders.

“A pleasure for me as well.”

“She told me she sees you around town now and then,” I said. “Out and about with your friends. I told her she ought to say hi sometime.”

They looked at me as if I’d said something inappropriate, which made me too uncomfortable to continue.

“I would imagine she does,” Dad said. “Vienna can be a pretty small place that way.”

“Yes,” she agreed instantly. “You are so right.”

He’d slipped into German for Litzi, even though she was fluent in English. It doubled my eerie sense that somehow they were operating on a different wavelength from me. I noticed a quick exchange of glances, but couldn’t decipher it.

“I, uh, saw Lothar Heinemann on our train,” I said. “He was watching out the window as the police led us away.”

This remark also turned their heads. In unison, of course. They were acting like brother and sister.

“I’m beginning to wonder,” Litzi said, “if he was the same man who spoke to me in a bookstore a week ago.”

Now it was Dad and me whose heads were yanked on a string.

“Lothar?” we said.

“Which bookstore?” I asked.

“Kuhnhofer, an antiquarian store just off the Graben. I was looking through a pile of old manuscripts and he asked if I needed help finding anything. I thought he worked there, then later I saw him leave with a bag of books in one hand and a cane in the other. He even recommended a title to me.”

“Which one?” Dad asked.

She paused, trying to remember. We awaited her answer as if she were the Oracle at Delphi.

“I don’t remember.” She looked down at the last of her brandy. “But the word ‘secret’ was part of it.”

“Genre title,” Dad said. I nodded in agreement.

He swirled the last of his brandy, still deep in thought. Litzi and I swallowed ours, fully medicated now.

“I’ve been thinking about Lothar,” Dad said. “It would be a mistake to regard him as a malign influence. If you ever manage to pin him down, he might even be able to help.”

“All he’s done so far is give me the creeps. Why was he on the train?”

“It’s your handler that gives me the creeps. He certainly doesn’t mind putting you in harm’s way.”

“True. But maybe he was also our guardian angel.”

“It certainly seems that way. All the embassy knew was that someone had intervened on your behalf. They didn’t know who or why.”

“But why would he have someone plant the Semyonov book next to the body?”

Then I told them about the marked passage. Litzi seemed to shiver.

“I’m sorry if all of this is stirring up unpleasant memories,” Dad said.

She nodded, smiling appreciatively. Maybe this was my opening to finally clear the air, with Dad along as a sort of mediator.

“Litzi, this morning Dad mentioned something about what happened after you and I came home from Berlin, right before I moved away.”

Dad shot me daggers but I couldn’t stop now. He lowered his head in apparent embarrassment as I plowed forward.

“He said it was no big deal, but how come you never told me that you’d spied on us?”

Litzi looked at me, then at Dad, who shook his head slowly.

“My fault entirely,” he said. “I tried telling him it was harmless and understandable, but obviously that wasn’t good enough for him.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “I should have said something. I’ve always been ashamed of it. But I also have to say that if I had to do it over again I would not change a thing. You weren’t in that room to hear what they said. Your father hadn’t spent half his life telling you about those kinds of people and what they were willing to do.”

“Really, Litzi,” Dad said, “you don’t need to explain. Bill was too young, too sheltered. He had his nose in too many books.”

“Speak for yourself,” I said, a little irritated with both of them.

Dad stood.

“I need to use the men’s room,” he said. “You two hash it out however you like, but you don’t owe me any explanations, Litzi.”

She seemed grateful for the gesture, and, counter to expectations, his departure helped dissipate the tension between us.

“Well?” I said. “What really happened back then?”

“You know the worst of it. They threatened my family. They talked about holding me in East Germany until my father agreed to repatriate. I never really believed they would do it, but the uncertainty is what finally gets you. That and the number of times they repeat it, over and over, in that awful little room in Bad Schandau. That terrible man and his stupid Russian sidekick.”

“Sidekick? The German in the brown coat was the only one I spoke to.”

“They swore me to secrecy about the Russian. I was never to mention him to you or your father. Not that he ever told me a name.”

“They brought up my father with you?”

“He’s mostly what they wanted to talk about, once they finished scaring me with threats and browbeating. And by then the Russian was doing all the talking.”

“What did they want to know?”

“What he was like. Who he knew. They asked if I’d been in your house, what I’d seen there, what his habits were like.”

“His habits?”

“How often he came and went. Especially at night. If he ever left through the back of his building. I told them I didn’t know. ‘Well, then, find out!’ he said.” She paused, picking up her glass, then realizing it was empty. “They asked me to go through his things.”

“Jesus, Litzi.”

“I told them I was too scared. I made up things about how mean your father was, and what a terrible temper he had. So they said to wait until I was alone in the house with you. I said my parents wouldn’t let me be there alone. They laughed at that. The Russian said my parents also wouldn’t want me to disappear one day from the streets of Vienna. So I said I would try.”

“Was I ever that lucky, to get you all alone in my house?”

“Twice, remember?”

Now I did, especially the second time, when my dad had stayed out very late. I vaguely recalled that the evening had ended on a melancholy note, which I’d attributed at the time to my imminent departure. Now I knew better.

“When you went downstairs to steal us a drink from your father’s liquor cabinet, I went out in the hallway to his door, and opened it. I went to the bedside table and poked around some books and papers, then I froze when I heard you coming back up the stairs. I couldn’t go through with it. I hurried back and told you I’d been in the bathroom.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I made up things, mostly. Mostly I talked about his books.”

“What did they say?”

“I thought for sure they’d know I was lying, but they seemed very interested. They wanted to know which titles he had taken down from his shelves, and if any of the pages were marked. And then, a few days ago, you come along with all of these stories about the same kind of thing, books with marked passages and secret meanings. So of course I had to try and find out what was happening, and I can’t help but wonder if this is why I was chosen.”

“To help me, you mean?”

She nodded.

“Maybe it’s even the same people,” she said.

“The Russians? That doesn’t make sense. My handler wants to find out if Lemaster was a double agent. The Russians would already know.”

“Unless they were trying to find out if he was a faithful double agent, a real double agent.”

Excellent point, and the possibility that it might be true cast everything I’d been doing in a new light. Even the Hammerhead might be my handler. Then, just as suddenly, the idea seemed ludicrous.

“I don’t know, Litzi, using all of these old spy titles to lead me around just feels so, well, American, don’t you think?”

“You don’t think Russians read all those novels? You don’t think they weren’t going through every page looking for kernels of truth, just like you were?”

Another good point, which made my head hurt.

“I’m scared of all this, Bill. Especially after what happened to Vladimir. I love seeing you, love being with you again. But now it seems like too much, too far. Yet every time I think of quitting, or of not getting on that train to Prague, my curiosity becomes bigger than my fear, because this has become personal for me as well. And now you know why.”

“So you still want to go?”

“From what your father says, it sounds like we’d better.”

“Probably.”

“But Prague won’t be enough, will it?”

“Budapest, too, most likely. After that, who knows?”

“Then I had better phone my office to clear enough time. I’ll have to come up with something good, I suppose.”

Dad returned to the table, so she took her phone off to a corner where we wouldn’t have to hear her lying to her bosses. He looked me over carefully, as if inspecting for damage.

“Everything all right between you?”

“Yes.”

“Glad to hear it. You’re a lucky man.”

“I suppose I am.”

“All the same, be careful.”

“I don’t intend to hurt her.”

“I meant for yourself.”

“I’m not sure how I’m supposed to take that.”

“Just as well. I’m not quite sure how I meant it.”

I was about to ask for an explanation when he held a finger in the air and reached into his pocket for a folded sheet of paper.

“Almost forgot,” he said, glancing around to make sure we weren’t overheard. He lowered his voice. “I talked to Lewis Dean at the embassy.”

“The ‘regional specialist’?”

“I asked about that Russian you described, the one you called the Hammerhead. He seemed to think it might be a fellow they used to keep tabs on years ago. They never knew his code name but called him Brass Tacks. They were pretty sure he worked for a Moscow hand named Oleg.”

Leo’s handler. And Leo, aka Vladimir, aka Trefimov, was now dead after having put some of his oldest secrets up for sale. I nodded and tried not to look alarmed.

“Lew checked some files for me. Dormant for ages on the subject of Brass Tacks, except for one item. They think that in the past year he went into business for himself with a bunch of other old hoods, calling themselves the Argus Consortium, which didn’t show up on anyone’s radar screens until this.” He unfolded the paper, a photocopy of a New York Times piece from two months ago. “Take a look.”

It was a brief story from the business section about new government contracts landed by Baron Consulting.

“Isn’t Baron Breece Preston’s company?”

“Keep reading.”

Baron had won two new U.S. contracts for intelligence services in Afghanistan and Colombia. Rough neighborhoods. Lucrative pay. The story estimated the total payout over the next six years would be $660 million, pending congressional approval. Then came the kicker. “The new contracts,” the Times said, “cap a busy summer of expansion in which Baron also won a security contract in the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan, as part of a joint venture with the Moscow-based Argus Consortium.”

“Interesting,” I said, trying not to show how worried I was by this alliance of two such disagreeable fellows, both of them apparently connected in some way-but how? — to the trail of old clues Litzi and I were exploring.

“Lew also said Breece Preston has apparently gone walkabout in the past few weeks.”

“Walkabout?”

“Disappeared almost overnight from their Baghdad operations center. Some cover story about a health issue involving his family, but no one’s buying it, mostly because no one seems to know where he’s gone.”

“Wonderful.”

“It’s still not too late to get out, son.”

“Actually…” I handed back the paper “… it’s beginning to sound like it is.”

He grimaced and looked down at the table, but didn’t disagree. He was about to say more when he looked up and broke into a smile for Litzi, who had materialized at my shoulder holding her suitcase. Dad stood. I did the same, although I felt a little shaky.

“All clear,” she said brightly. “We’d better get going before they change their minds.”

We said our farewells on the sidewalk.

“Best of luck, son.” Dad gripped me fiercely. “I’m here if you need me. And don’t forget to keep David apprised of your movements.”

The three of us exchanged hugs. Then he went one way and we went the other. The weather was almost springlike, and to judge from her sunny smile, Litzi seemed to be shaking herself free of the ghosts that had been stalking her only minutes earlier.

I was the moody one now, not only worrying about who might be waiting around the next corner, but also wondering what Dad had meant by his cryptic warning about Litzi. I wondered, too, what both of them knew that I still didn’t.