Dan Fesperman - The Double Game

“I said, do you understand?” The knife blade was inches from my face, tilted downward.

“Yes,” Litzi said from her end. “We understand.”

He backed away, but only a few feet.

“Did anyone follow you?”

“Not that I know of.”

“That is not a good enough answer.”

I shrugged.

“We checked several times,” I said. “Moscow Rules.”

“And you relied on her?”

“I’m not exactly a trained professional, or didn’t they tell you?”

He wearily shook his head, but kept the knife pointed forward. It was rusty and stained, and probably dull, not that I cared to find out.

“Who is playing with my security like this?” he asked. “Do you know?”

“You’ll have to ask your handler.”

“My handler!” he said disdainfully. “He has been dead eleven years. These people now are never of any use except for themselves.”

He paused, thinking over what to say, while I took stock of the room. The apartment was in the same shape as Vladimir. Plaster cracked, ceiling watermarked. The lumpy couch reeked of cat urine, and the upholstery was shredded along the back. No carpeting, just scuffed oak, with mouse droppings in the corners. The heat was off, and it was chilly.

Vladimir stepped to the window and flipped back a heavy curtain, which ejected dust into a pale band of sunlight. He looked down at the street in both directions, then dropped the curtain and came back to the couch, knife still at the ready. I glanced at Litzi, but she was watching Vladimir. I’m not sure what I’d expected, but it hadn’t been anything like this.

“I assume you have some sort of message for me. For us.”

“You are to tell no one of my location. They would pay good money to know it, but if you take their money you will be dead inside a week.”

“Whose money?”

He waggled the knife and stepped closer.

“Don’t treat me as a fool unless you wish to exit through the window.”

Then he retreated to a far corner, where he knelt in a scatter of mouse droppings and, without turning his back, began working at a floorboard with the knife.

A scene from Len Deighton’s Berlin Game flashed into my head-Bernie Samson, scolding a contact for hiding something beneath the floorboards, because that’s where the searchers always looked first. Vladimir seemed to have run out of energy and ideas, an old spy at the end of his tether.

The board came free. He pulled out a small, clean envelope and stood unsteadily, then brought it to the couch and tossed it in my lap. When I moved to open it, he stepped closer and thrust out the knife in warning.

“Not here.” The blade was inches from my nose, close enough to smell the rusty steel. “Anywhere you please once you’ve left, but not here.”

“Okay.”

“Tell your people it is from my own files,” he said. “I knew someday there would be interest.” He waggled the knife, flicking it across the tip of my nose as if he was scratching an itch. “If the wire transfer does not occur within three days, then I will come for you. For both of you. But if your clumsiness leads the others here first, then you can be certain that they will next come for you.”

“Who are the others?”

He scowled as he had at my previous claim of ignorance. Then he slowly, achingly, raised the blade until it was touching the hair on my forehead. He flicked it sideways, scratching the skin and tossing my hair.

“Ask such a question again and I will shove this straight into your lying mouth.” I listened to his breathing, trying to remain as still as possible and not daring to look away from his eyes. He slowly backed away, but only a step, and he continued to hold the knife forward.

“The wire transfer,” he said again. “Three days, no longer.”

“It will be done.”

He smiled grimly but said nothing. Then he coughed and blew his nose on the sleeve of his free hand. I stood uncertainly, and Litzi followed suit. He watched wordlessly as we stepped toward the door. I was turning the rattling old knob when he spoke again.

“I have an oral message for you as well.”

“Yes?” When I turned, he was grinning

“Prague.”

I paused with my hand on the knob.

“Prague what?”

“That is the complete message. Prague. Now leave. And if you see them before they see you, which I doubt you are capable of doing, then you had damn well better run like you have never run before.”

His wheezing laughter followed us halfway down the stairs.

Back out in the street I looked up at Vladimir’s windows and saw a curtain flick back into place. Maybe he was watching to see if we were followed. Maybe we should be doing the same.

“Where to?” Litzi asked. She brushed back the hair from my forehead and looked closer. “No blood. Only a very light scratch.”

“We should find someplace to open this thing. I was about to suggest the Braunerhof, but I guess we shouldn’t be so predictable.”

“Burger King,” she said. I frowned. “Well, if you really don’t want to be predictable.”

“Lead the way.”

There was a Burger King at Stephansplatz only a few blocks away, which explained why a Whopper banner was hanging from Harry Lime’s house. A trio of punk-looking boys on skateboards nearly collided with us outside the entrance, but otherwise we attracted no apparent interest. We slid into a plastic booth that smelled of French fries. After a precautionary glance, I tore open the envelope.

No book pages this time. There was a pair of photo negatives, both in black-and-white.

“Looks like a document,” Litzi said. “Two pages, or maybe two different documents.”

At the top of each frame was a tiny blob that might be an official crest or logo.

“We need to get it developed,” I said. “But we can’t give it to just anyone.”

I thought of George Smiley, and the negatives he’d discovered among the last effects of his Vladimir. He’d developed them himself, in the basement of his flat on Bywater Street, but I didn’t have a clue about that sort of thing.

“I know someone at the Archives who can help,” Litzi said.

“Do you trust him?”

“She. Yes. And she owes me a favor.”

She got out her cell phone. The whole transaction took less than a minute.

“We have to hurry, she wants to leave soon.”

The bonus was that I got to see where Litzi worked, because her office was just downstairs from the Prunksaal, the court library of Emperor Charles VI, a bibliophile’s baroque paradise of patterned marble floors, ceiling frescoes, gilded woodwork, and floor-to-ceiling books, with an ample supply of ladders and stairways for reaching each and every volume.

“How did I ever miss this place when I was a boy?”

“It’s not like you could have just walked in. And would you have been half as impressed when you were sixteen? I doubt there are too many Lemasters up there.”

“Snob. What did our photo developer say?”

“She’ll have our prints in forty minutes.”

She gazed up toward the highest shelves, where someone on a ladder was carefully dusting a row of leather bindings.

“We’re dinosaurs, aren’t we?” she said. “Books are like Latin, the new dead language. Even most of the manuscripts I deal with have been digitized. So is everything that people write about them. Dust to dust, places like this. I should show you around before it all disappears.”

She gave me the cook’s tour, and we strolled companionably from shelf to shelf. The smell alone was intoxicating-all those pages, lovingly tended. Then her phone buzzed.

“Thanks. Be right there.” She hung up. “Wait for me at one of those tables. If anyone asks, say you’re with me.”

She returned with a manila envelope and a magnifying glass and sat down next to me. She opened the envelope and pulled out two eight-by-ten prints.