The Double Game

32

We settled into our new digs, a tiny inn that Litzi chose for its front and rear entrances and the desk clerk’s striking lack of curiosity. He requested neither passports nor true identities.

Her checklist apparently didn’t include cleanliness. The bedsheets smelled like the stairwell, and the bathroom looked like an art installation celebrating a century of rust. But after locking the rickety door I finally felt secure enough to get out Szondi’s copy of The Great Impersonation.

Author E. Phillips Oppenheim had never been a spy, although he worked for Britain’s Ministry of Information. Hardly anybody today has heard of him, even though in the 1920s he was famous on both side of the Atlantic. He made the cover of Time magazine, and wrote more than a hundred novels. Yes, a hundred.

The Great Impersonation was probably the most popular, but by the time I tried to read it in the early seventies it was badly dated. I didn’t make it past the first chapter, mostly because the characters kept saying things like “By Jove!” and “Ripping of you, old chap!”

Now, as I flipped through the pages in search of a message, those “By Joves!” kept winking up at me. I found nothing in the text. Then I slid my fingers along the clothbound cover and peered down the spine for any sign of an inserted note. No success there, either. Maybe the courier network had used a book code and sent the key by separate channels. That would explain why Lemaster took it in stride when Szondi kept the book.

Litzi, watching me, shook her head in disapproval.

“You’re out of that now, remember?”

“There’s nothing in here anyway.”

“Give it to your father, then.”

“He’s already got a copy.”

“Sell it on eBay.”

“Maybe we could trade it for dinner. I’m hungry.”

“Stay here. There’s a takeout place down the block.”

After she left I realized I was also craving a beer, but Litzi no longer had a cell phone, so I went in search of refreshment, hoping to make it back before her. I did, but on arrival I was greeted by yet another sealed envelope that someone had shoved beneath the door. So much for the idea that we’d covered our tracks.

Feeling vulnerable again, I set aside the beer and ran downstairs to the desk, where I discovered to my irritation that the clerk’s no-questions policy extended to visitors and would-be thieves.

“No see anyone,” he insisted in broken English, hands in the air like a suspect. When I continued to harangue him for information he went into his small office and shut the door. I hustled back upstairs, hoping to take care of business before the newly bossy Litzi returned. I took the envelope into the bathroom, shut the door for privacy, and slit it open.

The format was familiar enough-single sheet, typewritten, with a torn-out book page pasted below-except the paper wasn’t my stationery, and the typing hadn’t been done on my Royal. The deviations from the pattern made it feel like a rush job. Or maybe somebody new was issuing orders.

“I sense that your interest is waning,” the message began. “This will get you back on track. Think Belgrade 1992.”

Below was a street address in Pest near the Keleti train station, followed by the words, “Visit anytime. You’re expected.”

The reference to Belgrade ‘92 naturally piqued my interest, since that was the point at which my journalistic career ran off the rails, thanks to the denied visa. I expected the book passage to be something about dashed dreams or pouting young men.

It was far more cryptic. The page was from Le Carre’s A Perfect Spy, my favorite of his non-Smiley books. It was the tale of Magnus Pym, a Philby-style mole whose father was a charming con artist. Le Carre supposedly wrote it as a sort of personal exorcism, unloading his emotional baggage over his own dad. In that sense, at least, Magnus was the author’s alter ego. But in another way he was more like me-an only child raised by a single parent, the product of an insular upbringing in which father and son were almost always on the move. The marked excerpt was a mere sixteen words.

Love is whatever you can still betray, he thought. Betrayal can only happen if you love.

I was still trying to figure out what that could possibly have to do with Belgrade ’92 when I heard Litzi come back into the room.

“Bill?” She sounded worried.

“In the toilet. Be right out.”

“You went out for beer?” She’d found the six-pack on the bed.

“Sorry, I was thirsty. Tried to catch you on your way out.”

I folded the message into my pocket, then flushed the toilet and ran water from the tap. When I opened the door I saw that she, too, had picked up some beer.

“You shouldn’t have left. I doubt the desk clerk is very vigilant.”

“You’re probably right about that.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Your face doesn’t look like ‘nothing.’ Did something happen?”

“Everything’s fine.”

She watched me a few seconds more. I considered telling her about the message. But it was more personal than the others, and it troubled me for reasons I couldn’t yet explain. The part about love and betrayal might even be referring to her, so for the moment I kept it to myself. If she was still hiding details of her career with the Verfassungsschutz, why couldn’t I hide this? But the main reason was that I didn’t want to have to explain what had happened back in ’92, or, rather, the aftermath, which I’d handled so poorly.

The food was Chinese, and tasty, and the atmosphere grew more relaxed as we stuffed ourselves with dumplings and garlic chicken. By the time we finished, the room smelled of grease and soy sauce, and we’d downed four of the beers.

We watched some Hungarian television on a wavering black-and-white tube, then packed for an early getaway, brushed our teeth, and climbed into bed. There was no question of sex. Each of us was exhausted, worried, and, more to the point, too wary to make a move. Still, when she rolled up against me later in the sag of the narrow bed, I placed a hand on her waist and snuggled closer. It was a start. But toward what?

I awakened hours later, when it was still dark. The words of the message were still tumbling around in my head. I slipped out of bed and stood barefoot by the window, listening to the night for any sound of movement. I took the note from my trousers, unfolded it as quietly as possible, and reread the quote by the light over the bathroom sink.

Whose betrayal, I wondered? And whose love? And how was any of it relevant to the task at hand, or even to Belgrade ’92? If the note had made any sort of demand upon me, ordering me to appear at a certain time, say, or by a certain deadline, I probably would have defiantly ignored it. But by leaving things open-ended-”Visit anytime. You’re expected”-my handler had turned the request into an enticement, a lure, and as I pulled on my trousers I surrendered to its power.

I shut the door behind me with a tiny click. The innkeeper was gone from his darkened post. When I reached the street I took out my map of the city. Trams and subways weren’t running at this hour, but my destination was only about a mile away, so I set out on foot. Every step echoed in the empty streets, and for blocks I stared cautiously into the depths of every shadow. As I eased into a rhythm, my nervousness abated. Clearly I was alone.

The address was a house, a crumbling three-story Hapsburg fortress built of stone, with grand dormers, a spired turret, and a pitched slate roof. I rang the bell, but there was no sound in response, so I knocked loudly, then began counting the seconds beneath my breath. At eleven I heard footfalls on the stairs. The only other sound was the hum of a streetlamp.

Someone was coming, a heavy but uncertain tread, like a man leery of falling. Old, I guessed. A key rattled and clicked. The door opened just enough for an eye to peer out at me from a face full of folds and wrinkles. The door swung free.

With Belgrade as a point of reference, I recognized him right away, even after nineteen years. He looked as grumpy and disagreeable as ever.

“Cage,” he croaked. “Inconvenient as always.”

“The message said anytime.” My voice misted in the autumn chill. “I decided to take you at your word.”

“ I didn’t write that.”

He glanced up and down the street, then motioned me inside.

“You’d better be alone.”

“As far as I know.”

He wore a white silk robe and felt slippers. He didn’t offer a hand in greeting, which was just as well because I wouldn’t have taken it.

“You do know who I am?” he asked.

“Of course. Milan Bobik.”

Bobik had been the press spokesman for the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry. He was the official who, after days of testy wrangling, had finally marched me into a conference room and explained that my visa request had been denied. The decision, he emphasized, was final and irrevocable, and no manner of appeal or pleading would ever make it otherwise. To my mind, Bobik embodied the beginning of my end.

The Post protested the decision, but recalled me from the field and sent a more acceptable candidate. The following week I sat down with my wife, April, to say that, until I had a chance to regroup professionally, perhaps we’d better postpone our plans for starting a family. At least by one year, preferably two. That’s when she told me she was pregnant with David. He was the greatest gift of my life, and at the time I treated him as a millstone, an ambush. As I said before: Beware the thwarted man, particularly if he is in his mid-thirties and is already gazing off with trepidation toward the bitter end. I acted like an immature ass, spoiled and undeserving, and now here I was back at the source, although I suppose I’d known for all of these nineteen years that the real source of the problem was me.

Bobik sat me down in his kitchen, which smelled of onions and old plumbing. He flipped on a ceiling light, squinted, then retrieved a bottle and two glasses from a cabinet and set them on the table.

Slivovitz, of course, the Balkan plum brandy that had lubricated more than a dozen years of war and revolution, and entire centuries of aggrievement.

“Drink first, you will need it.” He didn’t forget to help himself.

“What are you doing in Budapest?” I asked.

“When Milosevik fell, Belgrade was not the right place for people like me. So here I am. All those cowards who came here during the war to dodge conscription are now back in Belgrade, pretending to be true Serbs. I should have waved to them as we passed at the border.”

“What do you do now?”

“It is too late for a chat. Drink.”

I polished off the brandy in two swallows, a cheap store-bought brand that was as about as smooth as sulfuric acid. He poured another shot.

“You will need them both.” A grim nod of certainty, but I shook my head and pushed away the glass. He shrugged, drained it himself, then stood and went to a desk in the hall, where he slid open a drawer. He walked back to the table holding a folded paper in his right hand.

“I understand, Cage, that you and your father are both collectors. I am as well, especially of items that are likely to appreciate in value.”

He handed me the paper, then remained standing as I unfolded it and began to read. It was a letter, dated March 11, 1992, on the official stationery of Wallace Vandewater, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, U.S. Department of State.

The letter was only two paragraphs, four sentences in all. Mr. Vandewater certainly got straight to the point:

Dear Mr. Bobik,

We respectfully request for reasons of national security that the application for a residence visa filed with your country by Washington Post correspondent William D. Cage be respectfully but firmly denied. By necessity, our rationale for this request must remain confidential. On the same grounds, we further request that the reason for your denial not be revealed to Mr. Cage.

I trust this will be our only correspondence on this matter.

Respectfully yours,

Wallace Vandewater

He signed it with a flourish, like a literary autograph dashed off in a great hurry so that other fans wouldn’t be kept waiting. I’d never met Mr. Vandewater, but I did know his top deputy at the time, Warfield Cage. My father went to work for Vandewater in 1991, after the State Department finally called him in from the field following thirty-six years of diplomatic service. He remained at the job until 1998, when he retired to his favorite city, Vienna, the birthplace of his son.

At first, I wasn’t sure what to feel. Shock, of course. Dismay and grief, naturally. Collectively they hit me hard enough to stir up the first wallowing surge of nausea, which I fought down by drawing a deep breath. My chest felt tight for a second or two, but I was certain that anger would soon make me capable of breathing fire, even though at the moment a huge boulder of bewilderment was blocking its path.

I reread the letter, looking closely, even desperately, for any sign that a mistake had been made, or that Vandewater’s intent had been misconstrued. Missing that, I hoped to discover signs of a forgery, a ruse.

But as a diplomat’s son I’d seen these kinds of letters many times before, on this very grade of official stationery. And as badly as I wanted to find something amiss, everything was in order. The only item that might be in doubt was whether Vandewater himself had written it, because I knew from Dad that these sorts of chores were often handled directly by deputies, who added their bosses’ signatures with an autopen.

Is that what my father had done? Was he in fact not just a willing participant but the instigator? And why? National security? The idea was preposterous. I was a journalist then, period. Ambitious and curious, yes, but only a scribbler. I didn’t keep secrets, I exposed them. Why had I been the object of this outrage?

I needed another drink, but when Bobik anticipated me by pouring a glass, I refused to give him the satisfaction.

“There is more,” he said. “As I told you, I am a collector.”

He handed me an old report of some kind, but it was typed in Cyrillic characters-either Russian or Serbian-and I couldn’t read a word of it.

“Is this in Serbo-Croatian?”

“Serbian. It is from an ambitious young employee in our Foreign Ministry in 1959, Ivo Markovik. His job was to coordinate electronic and visual surveillance of Western embassies. Would you like a translation?”

“Probably not, but go ahead.”

1959. The year of the polygraph that Valerie Humphries told me about. The year that Dad and Ed Lemaster must have first crossed paths, and probably Breece Preston as well. The year my mom left us, then died on a high road in Greece.

“Apparently your father became involved in some sort of dispute. ‘A flap,’ I believe they called it.”

“Flap” had always been CIA slang for a screw-up.

“Over what?”

“It is vague. Markovik could not recover every detail. But it was serious enough that a polygraph machine was used, and its results were debated, then suppressed. The other figure in this drama was a young embassy functionary whom we had already identified as an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency. He is known now as a great author.”

“Edwin Lemaster.”

Bobik nodded.

“Markovik determined that some sort of indiscretion had occurred.”

“Indiscretion?”

“A security lapse. Potentially a serious one. Apparently there was great worry in your embassy of public embarrassment, even scandal, but Markovik concluded that your father was able to keep it under wraps.”

Just as I thought.

“So this was something Lemaster had done?”

“The evidence was not clear on that point. All that Markovik knew for certain was that one of their careers was briefly in the balance, then saved. A salvage job. I believe that was the term he used.”

Meaning Dad had either covered for him, or had coached him on how to beat the machine on a second try.

“What else?”

“Well, don’t you see the link?”

“The link?”

“To what happened in ’92. Ivo Markovik-do you not recognize the name?”

Now I did, even though I’d done my best to erase every memory of my brief time in Belgrade.

“He was at the Foreign Ministry,” I said. “One of the Milosevik people.”

“A top deputy. Had you been installed as a full-time correspondent, you would no doubt have sought to interview him. And when your name came up for a visa, he was the one who remembered this affair from the 1950s. Being a collector himself, he quickly produced a copy of this old report. Your father, no doubt, became aware of its existence.”

“So he had me blackballed?” I was incredulous. “Some minor embassy cover-up for a CIA man led him to engineer this? ”

“You must understand. The Western media were completely against us. We were using all leverage at our disposal to change that. If you had worked in Belgrade, I am sure that this would have been used to try to influence you. Your father’s past would have been exposed. And with it, Mr. Lemaster’s.”

I didn’t buy it. Or at least not until I considered a further possibility:

What if, by covering for Lemaster, my father had enabled a budding double agent to flourish and grow? And what if, by 1992, even Dad suspected as much? Darker still, what if he’d then become part of Lemaster’s campaign of deception, which would have made him even more vulnerable to the release of those old secrets from 1959?

A real Joe. That was how Lemaster had described Dad on the day of our interview. “Joe” was British espionage slang for “agent,” as I knew from my reading. A few days ago Dad had sworn point-blank that he’d never worked for the CIA, and I’d believed him. Maybe I should have asked instead if he’d ever worked for the KGB.

“You see it, do you not?” Bobik said it with a note of triumph. “I can tell by your eyes. It is true. He worked against your interests in order to protect his own.”

That was indeed the nut of it, a painful truth that landed like a knife at the bottom of my gut. And what of my mother, who had left us that very year? Had Dad’s duplicity driven her away? She might even have discovered details that Markovik hadn’t known, so she’d run off to Greece to be killed in an accident. Assuming it was an accident. Because Breece Preston was possibly in the mix as well, in some way, shape, or form. What did I truly know about any of those events, other than my father’s version?

A chain reaction of doubt and worry built toward critical mass, fueled by slivovitz. I stood shakily from Bobik’s table. His air of satisfaction sickened me. I wanted out of there. Now.

“You must think about these things, then act upon them,” he said smugly as he followed me to the door.

As I reached the silence of the streets I thought I heard him laughing. Like Szondi, I thought. Like all of Budapest, it seemed.