Dan Fesperman: The Double Game

I glanced again toward the table by the door. A busboy was clearing the dishes. She’d left behind her magazine, and when the busboy picked it up I looked at David and he looked at me.

It was an old copy of Life, with Joseph Stalin on the cover.

This was not the Vienna I’d known as a boy. Riding the S-Bahn into the city I sat among Turks and Arabs, their chatter clouding the air like gnats. When the Turks got off, Bosnians got on. Orange commuter straps swayed overhead like hangman’s nooses, and as usual after a transatlantic flight I felt like the walking dead.

Out in the streets, police cameras stared from every corner. A tram line I’d once used no longer existed. When I went in search of coffee to help me recalibrate- the signature drink of Viennese living-the first place I saw was a damn Starbucks. Still, it was caffeine, and after a few swallows my outlook improved.

Some things hadn’t changed. Pedestrians at crosswalks still waited dutifully for the light, and old women still glared when I crossed anyway, the embassy boy back to his old tricks. In the clipped green expanses of the Stadtpark, grown men still peed behind the sparsest of cover, a habit that now seems reasonable with public toilets charging a euro. This being a Sunday, practically everything was geschlossen, just as it would have been thirty-five years ago.

Most reassuring of all was Vienna’s enduring beauty-block after block, stacked and frosted like a wedding cake. Yet, to my more experienced (jaded?) eye, the imperial magnificence looked brittle-as if the city’s aging face had received an injection of Botox and could no longer crack a smile.

My dad was a late riser on Sundays, so I’d told him my flight was getting in hours later than it really was, meaning I had a few hours to kill before arriving on his doorstep. He’d been oddly thrown by the idea of a visit on such short notice.

“Day after tomorrow? Goodness. Well, I’ll have to do some juggling, but yes, of course, Sunday would be perfect! I’ll reserve a table at Figlmuller, and to hell with the tourists. A schnitzel and a Gosser will have you feeling right at home.”

Juggling? Was I that hard to prepare for?

I set out on a long walk, part of my usual plan for beating jet lag by avoiding naps at all costs. It was cloudy and cool, and I kept an eye out for tails, especially slender women with red flowers or leashed Alsatians. So far, only the cameras were watching.

Shortly after one thirty I reached my dad’s stately old building, a block off the Graben in the Hofburg quarter. I pressed the button by his name, shoved open the door on his answering buzz, then rode the tiny caged elevator to five. He was waiting in the hall dressed in his usual Sunday uniform of tan corduroys and a blue Oxford.

“The prodigal returns!” His stock greeting. “Let me take your bag, you must be exhausted.”

He had laid on quite a spread. On the dining room table was a beaded pitcher of orange juice next to a carafe of coffee. Slices of meat and cheese were arrayed like playing cards on a china platter alongside a basket of croissants and bowls of yogurt, muesli, and sliced fruit. A full Vienna Fruhstuck, even at this hour, and the gesture was touching. It reminded me of how anxious I’d been to please David two days earlier, and I wondered if parents ever stopped feeling as if they needed to launch a charm offensive whenever their grown children came home.

“I hope you’re hungry, or would you like a lie-down first?” Using the British term.

“I’ll eat. It looks great. Then a shower, maybe. But I need to stay vertical.”

“Of course. Your stoical approach to jet lag. Here, let’s take your plate to the living room where it’s not so damn gloomy. I’ll bring the coffee.”

He drew open the blinds to a view of old rooftops beneath brooding clouds.

“A cross-country sky,” he said. “Isn’t that what you used to call days like this?”

“I did. Looks like one of those days when our coach would run us ten miles through the Vienna woods.”

I could smell the trail as I said it-black mud and fallen leaves. Dad had come to all my races, screaming with surprising passion for a sport he’d never known. I think he appreciated its perfect meritocracy. No manner of favoritism or fakery could make you finish even a second faster. To a diplomat, that must have seemed miraculous.

“Reading anything good?”

His favorite question, and with the perfect backdrop. Bookshelves lined the two walls that got the least sunlight, so the bindings wouldn’t fade. The espionage first editions were on the far left, easy to spot by the shiny plastic covers over the dust jackets, the mark of a collector, although he’d read every copy at least twice. Dad certainly wouldn’t have needed hours to remember Tommy Hambledon, and it again occurred to me that he might be playing at least an advisory role for my mysterious controller.

“Funny you should ask,” I said. “I’ve been going through some old Lemasters.”

“You make it sound more like business than pleasure.”

“In a way, it is.”

“How so?”

“Are you sure you don’t already know?”

He frowned, puzzled. It seemed genuine.

“I’m here on a freelance assignment. Trying to ease back into a little journalism.”

“Wonderful!” He’d hated it when I gave up writing, and he almost never asked about my work at Ealing Wharton. “What’s the story?”

“Something you might be able to help me with. Vanity Fair wants a piece on the espionage career of Edwin Lemaster. That’s why I’ve been going through the books. Searching for clues to what he was really up to.”

Dad wrinkled his nose.

“Who put you on to this?”

The one question I didn’t want to answer. Dad was as sharp as ever.

“I got a tip in the mail. Anonymous.”

“The most reckless kind, for all concerned. Didn’t you take a big enough bite out of him the first time?”

“You act like that was my fault.”

He shrugged. I sipped coffee, waiting to see if he’d take sides. Maybe he already had.

“You know, I came across a review a few years ago that dated his entire decline as a novelist to that interview of yours.”

“Never saw it.”

But I had, of course, and one particular paragraph had lodged in my mind:

Ever since his “confession,” Lemaster has lost his edge, seemingly more interested in proving his loyalty than in honing his craft. His latest book, a techno-thriller in which Uncle Sam’s minions are portrayed only in the brightest hues of red, white and blue, completes his descent into mediocrity.

“The funny thing,” Dad said, “is that Agency people didn’t even raise an eyebrow about the whole confessional part.”

“Really?”

“It was his other slip that pissed them off.”

“There was another slip?”

“Think about it. Think of everything he told you.”

I did. I drew a blank until my father filled it in.

“‘I was looking for the Don Tollesons of the world.’ He was a mole hunter.”

“Well, yeah. That was pretty obvious.”

“And what does that tell you about who he worked for?”

“The Soviet desk?”

“Oh, come on.”

“Jim Angleton?” My father smiled but said nothing. “I didn’t think Counterintelligence had its own field men. Not overseas, anyway.”

“Nobody else thought so, either, including most of the CIA.”

“So it was off the books?”

“Everyone’s except Angleton’s, which he kept in a safe.”

Angleton yet again. Dead for more than twenty years, yet still coming up in my memories, and in my conversations with both David and Dad. And why not? Everything I’d ever read about him made him sound like the bizarre creation of some novelist, which of course made him seem real, eternal. He was the original Cold Warrior, one of the first to play the postwar game again the Soviets and play it well. In his hobbies, as in his work, he was a detail man, a miniaturist-tying flies, breeding orchids, combing files, hunting moles, deconstructing poems. Deeply suspicious, yet blinded by Anglophilia and his friendship with Kim Philby, whose betrayal drove him over the edge. And now I’d learned that Ed Lemaster had secretly worked for him.