Dan Fesperman - The Double Game

It also explained why he’d always preferred to live outside the embassy community.

“We should leave soon if we want to catch the early train,” Litzi said. She glanced out the window, and I saw that the first light of dawn was up, coating the rooftops in gold.

A new day was here. A new age entirely.

As we boarded the train I thought of all the men before me who’d been dispatched on grim missions to confront double agents with evidence of their duplicity. There was Nicholas Elliott, sent all the way to Beirut to try and wring a confession out of old pal Kim Philby. Le Carre’s Smiley, hiding in a dreary London safe house, listening through the walls as colleague Bill Haydon implicated himself to a Russian. Deighton’s Bernie Samson, meeting up behind the Iron Curtain with his wife, of all people, as she confirmed her defection to the Soviets. And poor old Folly, seated stiffly in a Vienna cafe, watching from behind a newspaper as his lifelong friend Don Tolleson came a cropper.

Now there was Bill Cage, pseudo-spy and snooping son, the man who hadn’t known when to quit, on his way to at last seek the truth from his dad, who had fooled him for a lifetime. I realized then that each of us, in his own way, had been on a mission of love. Folly even emerged from behind his newspaper long enough to shake Tolleson’s hand, for God’s sake, a gesture I’d never understood until now. The words of Magnus Pym told me all I needed to know.

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

The biggest difference between those other fellows and me was that the rivalries of the Cold War had eventually amounted to nothing-a tired whimper of resignation beneath a fallen Wall and a few toppled statues. But how would the long stalemate of secrecy between Dad and me end? In anger and division? Hope and reconciliation? I wanted the latter, of course, but it would be a few more hours until I found out.

As always, he was standing in his open doorway as I stepped off the elevator. I’d phoned ahead from the bahnhof saying we needed to talk, and I could tell from his somber expression and folded arms that he knew this was important. I put down my bag as soon as he shut the door. Then I cut straight to the heart of the matter.

“I know about Belgrade. Both times, yours and mine. And I know why you felt you had to do it.”

He paused to absorb the news, but he didn’t look surprised.

“I suppose Litzi was able to fill in some of the blanks. She’s certainly seen me around with my friends enough.”

“She mentioned that.”

“And there was that black book, once upon a time. I’ve always been grateful for her discretion.”

“Is that why you returned the favor? You must have heard later when she was recruited.”

“How much did she tell you about that?”

“She said it ended badly, but she didn’t say how badly.”

He nodded, but offered no more. I wasn’t sure whether to be touched or infuriated by their continuing delicacy with each other’s secrets.

“So what about you?” he asked. “Where do I stand with you?”

His expression was stoic, but his posture suggested he was bracing for a blow. Maybe that’s why he seemed surprised when I gripped his shoulders and embraced him. I felt him sag in relief. Then he gave me a fatherly squeeze, the kind he’d always had in reserve whenever I’d needed one most. For all of the subjects we had avoided over the years, he had never once ducked me in a time of need. I certainly couldn’t make that claim with regard to my own son. He sobbed only once, more a gasp than a cry, and when we broke apart his eyes were dry.

“I ruined things for you,” he said. “For your mother, too. As good as killed her.”

“That’s why she left?”

“How could she stay, once she knew what I was really like? She was planning to come back and get you. We even discussed the possibility of some sort of marriage of convenience, which was pretty much what we already had. We eventually agreed that she would travel for a few weeks to think about it, to sort things out. Then she would take you off to Boston, where her parents lived. You’d go to school there, and spend summers with me. So off she went. She’d always wanted to see Greece. Then she got on that damn bus.”

He went to a desk, where he unlocked a narrow drawer and pulled out a yellowed clipping from an English-language newspaper in Athens. Seventy-nine people in all, including four other Americans. The driver had been drinking.

“I cost you your mother. I’ve never forgiven myself for that.”

“You weren’t driving.”

“Might as well have been.”

“And you didn’t ruin me in ninety-two. You just gave me a handy excuse for me to do it myself.”

“I think we could both use a drink.”

I smiled, because that had always been his generation’s answer for everything. Angleton’s martinis, Folly’s Manhattans, and Dad’s bourbon, although for the moment alcohol seemed as good an elixir as any.

“Then we’ll have a long, long talk. Let’s sit in the living room.”

He poured two bourbons, neat, and we pulled up our chairs like a pair of old soldiers at a regimental reunion, knee to knee beneath his bookshelves. We covered all sorts of ground, awkwardly at first, then with a growing sense of ease.

Yes, he had failed a polygraph in Belgrade in ‘59, derailed by the obvious question. Yes, a young Ed Lemaster had helped him smooth it over, first by calling on his Agency connections who administered the program, then by coaching Dad to handle the questioning better the second time around.

“Here’s how naive I was then,” he said. “I didn’t even know he was CIA until this came up. Of course, afterward I was indebted for life. Maybe that’s what he was counting on. So when he came to me years later to ask for a few little favors, who was I to say no?”

Dad did seem surprised-alarmed, even-when I told him how extensive Lemaster’s courier network eventually became, with far more code names and far more couriers, me included.

“You?” he said. “Those errands I had you doing for those booksellers? My God, what a fool I was.”

His face darkened when I told him of the network’s apparent Moscow connections.

“Did you ever suspect he might be working for the other side?” I asked.

He thought about it for a second between swallows of bourbon.

“Let me put it this way,” he said. “Did you ever suspect me? Of being the way I am, I mean?”

“Maybe at some level. Especially when I was older, after college. I guess I did wonder why you always wanted a few days’ notice whenever I visited. I looked in your closets once, thinking I might find a whole row of dresses for some paramour.”

He smiled.

“Looking in closets. That alone should have told you something. It’s one reason all those books always appealed to me. Spying, duplicity, cover. Intelligent men leading two lives at once. It was everything I was doing, except in their versions it was more glamorous and exciting, even noble. Although not so much in the Folly and Smiley books. They were more like me. Nobility itself was the fiction.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me?”

“It was like any secret, I suppose. The longer you keep it, the bigger it grows. Before long, coming clean is no longer an option.”

“I would have understood.”

“Really? I’m not so sure.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, you’re quite enlightened about it now, of course. Anyone with half a brain is now. But you should’ve heard the things you used to say with your friends growing up. Fags, queers, and all that.”

I blushed. “I was awful.”