Dan Fesperman: The Double Game

He was a spymaster created by author Manning Coles, the pen name of a British mixed doubles writing team-Adelaide Frances Oke Manning and Cyril Henry Coles. The latter worked for British Intelligence, the former for the war office. They wrote dozens of Tommy Hambledon books. My dad had fifteen, but I owned only one- Drink to Yesterday, the first in the series, published way back in 1940.

I threw on a robe, descended the stairs in slippered feet, and retrieved the volume from the highest shelf. Dust puffed from the jacket as I turned to page 78.

At the bottom of the page, Tommy Hambledon told an excited new recruit exactly what entering the spy trade was about to do to his life:

“Yes, it’s got you now, and it will never let you go. When once the job has taken hold you’ll find that nothing else in life has any kick in it, and apart from the job you’re dead. Neither the fields of home nor the arts of peace nor the love of women will suffice.”

Under my present circumstances it sounded more like an enticement than a warning, and even as I began mapping my morning strategy for defending the fallen virtue of the Lattelicious Superluxe, in the back of my mind I already knew one thing for sure.

Used or not, I was going to Vienna.

You’ve probably guessed by now that I was an only child, and that my dad was a single parent. Two males, each playing solitaire, yet pleasantly companionable in our vagabond tour of Cold War Europe.

Only one memory of my mother survives, and even it remains in shadow. It is night, and I am two years old. We are living in Belgrade, forever my city of ill fortune. She stands backlit in my bedroom doorway, face in silhouette, features obscured. I am supposed to be asleep, so I shut my eyes as she steps forward in the dark to kiss me. Her lips are cool against my forehead. Her perfume is heady and Parisian, a scent phantom that has stalked me through life, growing fainter by the year.

She left us just before I turned three, then visited a few days later on the weekend of my birthday. Once the candles were blown out and I’d gone to bed, she and my father discussed how to divvy up custody. Then she went off to Greece, where a week later she died in a bus accident on some lonely hill in the Peloponnese. Probably while traveling with another man, I later surmised, although my father never said.

I like to believe that her absence made me a more careful observer. Children let their mothers do a lot of watching for them-keeping an eye out for cars, or for lurking strangers. My father hired nannies and sitters, of course, but I must have sensed that they never had quite the same stake in matters as a mom, so I developed a keener eye, a heightened awareness.

Her absence was at the heart of an ongoing conspiracy by which my father and I carefully avoided discussing delicate personal issues. Doing so would have risked having the subject of her desertion come up, so we spoke instead of the world around us-sports, school, current events. And books, always books. In Budapest, when I was nine or ten, the subject of American spies was in the news, so one night I asked my dad what it was, exactly, that spies did.

“Oh, things that we never see. With an import we can never be certain of. But rest assured, they make a difference, and they’re out there each and every day.”

“Where?”

“All around us.” He chuckled and shook the ice in his cocktail-a gin and tonic, so it must have been summer. “Like God.”

It was a surprising answer, considering he’d never once taken me to church, so I asked the logical follow-up.

“Do you believe in God?”

“Absolutely. Life didn’t just spring up out of thin air.”

“What do you think he’s like?”

“Oh, I doubt it’s a he or she, don’t you? I’ve never understood why everyone has to turn God into such a human, and not a very nice one at that. A petty know-it-all who demands to be worshipped, and will damn you to Hell if you don’t.”

Henceforth, the subjects of spies and God were intertwined in my mind. Both came to represent the unknown and the unknowable, which is probably why I was predisposed to like those novels of Dad’s. They were textual glances into the firmament.

Now, here I was about to join the priesthood, so to speak, by heading back to Vienna where all those first editions still lined his shelves-signed, dated, and dusted once a week. As a boy I’d occasionally spotted what I thought were glimmers of real characters hiding in their thickets of prose, especially Lemaster’s.

“Dad,” I would ask, “is this Mr. So-and-So from the embassy he’s writing about?”

“No, son, it’s a novel. All the characters are made up.”

“But-”

“They’re not real people, Bill.”

And that would close the subject until I spotted the next one, peeping from the pages like a fugitive. Now, based on the messages I’d received, it didn’t seem far-fetched to believe that every answer I sought might be found within those books.

But first things first. The secular business of Ealing Wharton awaited. I also needed a plausible excuse to go snooping around in my old backyard of Europe. Cover, in other words. Building a legend, as Folly would have put it. To do the work of a spy, I would have to start behaving like one, especially if someone was already tracking me.

God and spying. Father and son. A mole’s two masters. Tandems were much on my mind after my night of eerie visitations. Let the Double Game proceed.

My first independent act of espionage in Operation Lemaster, as it would later come to be known in official channels, was to lie to my boss. Easy. Having spent the morning dissembling under oath on behalf of a milk frother, fibbing to Marty Ealing for my own benefit felt as righteous as a donation to Amnesty International.

“Hate to drop this on you now, Marty, but I need a few weeks off. It’s personal.”

“Personal?”

We were in Marty’s office, and I knew I’d said the magic word. To Marty, “personal” is where everything juicy goes to hide, the stuff of leverage and control.

“It’s my dad.”

Marty frowned. Clearly he’d hoped for something messier, preferably a woman married to someone other than me. I have zero respect for Marty, which is one reason I still run. It takes at least four hard miles along the C amp;O towpath to sweat out a day’s labors at Ealing Wharton.

“He’s seventy-eight and lives alone in Vienna.” Sensing I was losing my audience, I picked up the pace. “I’m all he’s got, and, well, you know how it goes at that age.”

“Say no more, Bill. Hell, after the way you wrapped that committee around your middle finger this morning”-Marty always telegraphs his punch lines-”how could I say no? We’ll work out any adjustment to your compensation later.”

My second act was to phone Arch Bascombe, an old colleague from the Post who was now an editor at Vanity Fair. Might he be interested, I asked, in a freelance piece on the espionage career of author Edwin Lemaster?

“Isn’t he the one you burned in that interview piece way back when?”

“At least you remember.”

“So you finally got to the bottom of that?”

“Getting there. Headed to Vienna tomorrow, in fact.”

“I’ll bite. On spec, of course. And I can’t cover expenses.”

“Understood. But a letter of introduction would help. You’d be surprised how much weight that still carries in the Old World.”

Bascombe was charmed by the idea, and the price was right. He emailed me an official-looking letter on magazine letterhead. My cover was set.

I then telephoned the one person in Washington whose opinion still mattered to me. My son, David.