Dan Fesperman - The Double Game

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.”