The Double Game (8 page)

“Just answer me.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. I certainly wasn’t going to tell him everything.

“Even if I knew, I wouldn’t feel comfortable telling you.”

“Well, thank God for that, at least. I was beginning to think you were utterly hopeless. All I will tell you—all that I
can
tell you, Mr. Cage—is that I haven’t engaged in this sort of business for thirty-seven years, and frankly I never thought I would again. But when I did do it before, the name was always the same as now. Dewey. No surname, no address, just Dewey. The parcel, wrapped just like yours, would always arrive through the door slot over the weekend. I would be notified at home by telephone on Sunday morning, whereupon I would call your father promptly and exactly at two o’clock to tell him to come and pick it up.”

That at least explained my father’s startled reaction.

“Is that what happened this time?” Then I remembered the other question Dad wanted me to ask: “Who else has been in touch with you about this?”

“This time there was no phone call, only a note to my home, and then the parcel, delivered to the store. No one else was in touch.”

“Who sent the note?”

“There was no name. Please, Mr. Cage.” He was wringing his hands now.

“So, was my father the only one who ever came for these books?”

“I am not saying that. I am not even saying they were books, since I never opened the wrapping to check. It is even the same price as before, except in those days of course it was in schillings.”

I picked up the parcel and fiddled with the string, causing Christoph to practically spring from his chair.

“Please, Mr. Cage, not here! I don’t want to see it, and I don’t want to know.”

Where was all of this fear coming from? I put down the parcel, which seemed to calm him. Then he gave me a long look, which led to a question.

“Tell me one other thing, Mr. Cage.”

“If I can.”

“Are you in league with any Russian friends in this affair? Older ones in particular?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

He shook his head.

“It’s probably not important.”

“Then why did you ask?”

“As I said. Not important. I’m sure I’ve been imagining things. This entire Dewey resurrection has been very disconcerting.” He stood abruptly. “Good-bye, Mr. Cage. I am gratified your family still feels it can trust its business to me. I have always been a man of discretion, and will remain so despite your behavior. But you must go now.”

He briskly chivvied me out of the office, but didn’t follow me downstairs. When I reached the ground floor the store was empty, but there was a pile of euro notes on the counter by the register next to a handwritten list of titles.

Christoph had unsettled me enough that I decided to seek shelter before making another move. Stuffing the parcel in a coat pocket, I walked into the street, looked around quickly for surveillance, then ducked into the first
Konditorei
I could find, just down the block. I sat in a rear corner, facing the door, and as soon as the waitress took my order I put the parcel in my lap.

My handler had just upped the ante. Obviously he’d meant to rattle both Christoph and my father, and he had succeeded. Christoph, in turn, had rattled me. It was also obvious that my handler had intended me to learn that, long ago, my dad had been part of an established network for relaying information, with Dewey as a code name. But who were the other links in the chain? What did any of this have to do with Lemaster, other than the code name in his novel? And why had Christoph asked me that odd question about Russians? He’d claimed that he hadn’t handled a transaction like this in thirty-seven years, so I counted back to 1973—the year my father and I left Vienna for Berlin. It was also the year that Lemaster, basking in the glow of his first bestseller, had quit the CIA.

I fingered the string. The temptation to open it now was too great, so I looked around furtively before untying the knot and folding back the paper. The contents were anticlimactic. It was a German softbound edition of Lemaster’s
London’s Own,
a special book in that it was the volume in which the beleaguered Folly, seemingly past his prime, had finally turned the tables on his Soviet nemesis, Strelnikov. But there was nothing special about this edition, a dog-eared paperback from a fifth printing of a translation. I was about to open it when a man’s raspy voice made me jump half out of my skin.

“Fifty? For
that
?”

It was the harvester from Kurzmann’s, pulling up a chair as if we were old friends.

“Personally, I wouldn’t give you a fiver for it. Two if you were lucky.” His right hand darted across the table and snatched the book away. He tutted as he turned to the title page. “No. Not even signed.” To my relief, he handed it back.

His fingernails, which I would have expected to be chewed or dirty, were clean and manicured, and his hands looked soft. His face was unshaven, but he smelled freshly showered, and his eyes were a clear, sober blue, if a bit careworn. He spoke German with a lowbrow Berlin accent. The general impression he made was of someone who’d begun cleaning up his act but hadn’t quite finished. He carried an elegant cane of varnished oak topped by a wolf’s head of carved ivory, which he propped against the table.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I’m glad you spoke up so clearly back there at Christoph’s. I’m not sure I’d have recognized you otherwise.”

“You know me?”

“From many years and many places.” He rose nimbly to his feet. Books bulged from both pockets of his overcoat. “I trust that your father is well. A wonderful man. And in case you’re wondering, I’m not the only one who followed you here, although I’d have thought you’d at least notice the other one. She’s far more attractive.”

I looked around quickly, half expecting to see the slender young woman from Georgetown. The only other customer was an old man nibbling strudel at a far table.

“Oh, she’s long gone. Took off the second you untied the knot. For now I’d say you’re quite safe.” Then he crouched at my side and whispered in my ear. “Of course, that’s subject to change if you keep announcing yourself as ‘Dewey’ everywhere you go.”

He stood and checked his watch. “I should be going. Work to do.” He headed for the exit, thumping the cane against the floor with every step.

“Who are you?” I asked again.

He turned to face me as he opened the door.

“Tell your father that Lothar sends his regards. Farewell.”

Then, with a tip of his hat and a flap of his coattails, Lothar was gone, although for a few seconds more I heard his cane, tapping as urgently as an SOS.

Now, who the hell was Lothar? A bit player for hire, or a chance interloper? A goad or a threat? And who was following me? Or was that something Lothar had made up to rattle me, another part of his act?

I returned my attention to the paperback and noticed a bookmark peeping from midway through the text. It had a logo at the top from an antiquarian bookstore in Prague, with an address right around the corner from the apartment where my dad and I had lived when I was fourteen. The store’s name, Antikvariat Drebitko, immediately triggered a memory that, in the context of this morning’s events, was mildly disturbing. My father had twice sent me there to pick up exactly this kind of parcel—a book wrapped in butcher paper, tied with string. That memory, in turn, unlocked another: I had carried out similar errands in Budapest when I must have been only ten or eleven.

Had my father employed me as some sort of clandestine courier? At one level it was exciting, but now I could also see it from a father’s point of view, and I was appalled. Anything might have happened to me.

I opened the book to the marked page. At the top was a single handwritten word in block letters, next to a time:

“BRAUNERHOF. 10:30.”

Below, a passage of the novel was marked off:

Folly unfolded his reading glasses, which were smudged and scratched, an old pair that had been bent, dropped, sat upon, and left for dead in a dozen different cafés. He wondered why he didn’t just buy a new pair. Something to do with loyalty, he supposed, the comfort of the familiar. They maintained their wobbly perch on the bridge of his nose as he studied the map, the streets of Berlin coming alive to him like old friends after a long absence. Just by tracing his finger along the routes he could see the rendezvous point as clearly as if it were right there in front of him—a yellow phone booth in Zehlendorf, next to the bakery on Teltowerdamm. He knew the routine, too. Arrive on time, shut yourself inside, dial a number—any number—and then wait for the contact to appear at the door, checking his watch, acting like some impatient asshole that needed the phone right away. Hang up, open the door, and receive a parcel in passing as the stranger slid past you into the booth. Then keep on walking as if nothing out of the ordinary had just occurred. Anyone could do it. Even a spy past his prime with an old pair of specs and an outdated map.

Well, that seemed clear enough. A brush pass, as they said in the trade, and it was to occur in less than an hour. Obviously my handler was picking up the pace, an urgency that made me wary. But the location made me smile. The Café Braunerhof was a place of importance in my life, a wellspring of pleasant memories, and unless it had turned into some sort of chic WiFi hotspot, I was quite happy to make it my next stop.

8

A Vienna café is a perfect place for a secret rendezvous, because it doesn’t matter if either side shows up on time. The beauty of these establishments, from the grandest to the plainest, is that you can spend hours doing absolutely nothing without arousing the slightest suspicion. Even in our age of twittering impatience, a Vienna café is all about the art of refined indolence, reasonably priced. You go there to unplug, not to connect, and the entire staff is trained to assist you.

The transaction is blessedly simple: Purchase one cup of coffee—pricey, but only if you intend to gulp it down and leave—and in exchange you may linger as long as you like. Your waiter, dressed in a dinner jacket, won’t even give you a dirty look, but he will attend to your every need without complaint. Tip him generously and he probably won’t even remember you were there to begin with, in case the authorities ask later.

So there I was at the Braunerhof on a fine Monday morning with thirty-six minutes to spare, surveying the scenery from my former favorite table, along the side wall farthest from the entrance. To my amazement, everything looked exactly as it had in 1973, the last time I’d been there. The big windows up front spilled pale sunlight onto a row of wooden booths beneath twelve-foot ceilings. Beige walls, stained by nicotine, were hung with mirrors shaped like lozenges. There were coat racks between the tables up front, and I remembered that on rainy days they always reeked of wet wool. Plush benches ran down either side of the café to accommodate customers at smaller tables for two. In the middle of the room a pastry cart was backed against a cabinet table piled with newspapers on bamboo rods. Stationed in the back was the key location for my upcoming appointment—a phone booth built of varnished wood, with a small window in the door. In the old days it would have been a risky choice for a rendezvous. Customers occupied it at all hours. Now it was a charming anachronism, seldom used.

My nostalgia for the Braunerhof was easy to explain. At the age of sixteen I’d been sitting at this very table, playing hooky from school, when Litzi Strauss walked into my life. I’d come here to hide out, and to eat one of the café’s sublime omelets along with a warm strudel. To wash it down I ordered coffee
Obers
—with cream—my dad having taught me at an early age to caffeinate in order to cope with those European mornings when the sun didn’t rise until nine.

I remember the moment perfectly. My bill was paid, and I was contemplating where to go next, when Litzi strolled in with a toss of blond hair and a flicker of the most expressive brown eyes I’d ever wanted to dive into. She was a little tall for my taste, but judging by her furtive movements, she was a fellow renegade, also gone AWOL. I caught her eye as she paused by the newspaper table. She smiled fleetingly, then chose a copy of the same paper I was reading. I took it as a positive development—call and response, sign and countersign, as if we were already in secret communication.

In those days I was often awkward around girls, and I’d already guessed she was slightly older than I. Yet, for some reason—her welcoming smile? the lingering high from the toke I’d just shared with my friend Brenner in the Stadtpark?—she seemed within reach of my romantic capabilities. This rare burst of confidence made all the difference in my eventual approach. For once I was not like the fumbling Richard Folly or the morose George Smiley. I was instead, however briefly, more like one of those dashing fellows who were forever cuckolding my heroes.

She took a seat along the same wall, at the second table down, a mere six feet to my left. The electric effect of her presence seemed to make the wool stand up on my sweater. The waiter took her order, then she opened her paper with another glance my way. Sensing that the opening might be my last, I spoke up with uncharacteristic nerve.

“Meeting someone?”

“No. You?”

I improvised. “Harry Lime.”

“From that silly movie, you mean?”

“
Silly?
The Third Man
is only one of the greatest films ever made. Written by an even greater novelist.”

“Graham Greene’s too Catholic for me. The book’s not even a proper novel, you know. He wrote it originally as a screenplay. Did you know that?”

Of course I did, thanks to my father, who had nonetheless indulged me with a paperback of the book Greene eventually published. It wasn’t really an espionage tale, but it was rife with spylike duplicity, and prescient in its late-forties depiction of Cold War tensions. So yes, I certainly did know it. But mostly I was thrilled that
she
knew. It wasn’t the sort of arcana girls usually came up with. She was preaching to the converted, and we both knew it. In my excitement I blurted a non sequitur.