Dan Fesperman: The Double Game

Like a politician who pays too much attention to approval ratings, I’d been making something of a comeback with David during the past year, and nothing had pleased me more. While it would be nice to think my own efforts were responsible-I’d taken him on some college visits during his senior year of high school, and in the spring I’d attended all his lacrosse games-the real reason was his own maturation. Not only had he become an engaging and interesting young man, he had learned not to hold a grudge.

He was a freshman at Georgetown, right across the neighborhood, and we had dinner once a week. Now that he no longer lived at home, I was at last on equal footing with his mother for shared time. I wanted to let him know I’d be going abroad.

Fortunately he was free for the evening. He picked Martin’s Tavern, a hangout at Wisconsin and N within walking distance for both of us. As always, I arrived ten minutes early. Once you’ve deserted a child, you never again want him to enter a room where you’re supposed to be waiting and find it empty.

Martin’s is one of those places with English hunting prints on the wall and a brass rail at the bar. I ordered a pint of ale and settled into a booth. David arrived on schedule. Salazar, a waiter familiar with all the regulars, directed him to our table.

I stood to give him a hug, a greeting he’d recently begun reciprocating.

“You look good, David.” He was flushed from a workout. He’d be playing college lacrosse in the spring, but they already had him running and lifting weights. I loved watching him play because his motor never quit. It made me believe that somewhere inside him beat the heart of a distance runner, although I knew better than to say so.

“You look good, too, Dad. What’d you do, quit your job?”

He was perceptive in that way, like his grandfather.

“Next best thing. I’m taking some time off. Going to Vienna to see your granddad. After that, who knows? But I’ll be gone a few weeks.”

Salazar took our standard order-the Delmonico for David, lamb chops for me.

“How are your classes going?”

“Not as hard as I thought they’d be.”

“That comes later, when they know you’ve let your guard down.”

Sensing the onset of a fatherly lecture, he nimbly changed the subject.

“So how come you never told me about the history of this place?” He beamed as he said it, in the manner of all college freshmen bursting with new knowledge.

“Martin’s has a history? I know Washington never slept here.”

“Spies. It was a KGB hangout in the seventies. Some big-shot controller used to meet his boss here. Before that there was Elizabeth Bentley, the Red Spy Queen. She’d come here for drinks during the war, then meet her contact at a pharmacy down the street. Then there was the Russian defector, Oleg Kalugin, who ran out on his CIA contact from a restaurant right across the street, where the Five Guys is now. And about six blocks from here is where crazy Jim Angleton used to have his three-martini lunches, sometimes with Kim Philby. They were buddies, you know.”

“Whoa, now.” I took a big swallow of ale to hide my unease. The one topic I didn’t want to raise, and he’d raised it. “Where’d you learn all that?” Not from a sealed envelope slipped beneath his door, I hoped.

“I’m taking an intro to European history since World War II. For the Cold War he had us read The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. Awesome book. It made me want to look up all the spy stuff that happened around here. I kept thinking of all those novels of yours, so I’ve been checking out some of them from the library.”

Like father, like son, like grandson.

“Don’t bother with the library. Just ask. Or come and take them, you’ve got a key.”

It then hit me with devastating suddenness that David would have made the perfect accomplice for whoever was orchestrating my adventures, and for a millisecond I was perched on the edge of hurt and disappointment, thinking he would now reveal all with a belly laugh at my expense. A spy book caper, cooked up to spoof me. Just as quickly the moment passed. There were too many details he wouldn’t have known, and he certainly didn’t have the means to have broken into the house at the dead drop. And this was David, not some client at Ealing Wharton.

“Holy shit,” he said quietly. He was looking over my shoulder.

“What is it?”

“She looks just like Elizabeth Bentley. But it can’t be.”

“The Red Spy Queen?”

“Bentley wore a red carnation and carried a copy of Life magazine. And that woman over there…”

I turned and saw a slender woman alone at the table by the door. Attractive, late twenties. A red carnation was pinned to her navy business suit, and she was flipping through a magazine. I caught Salazar’s eye, figuring I’d ask if he knew her. About then a noisy party of six burst through the door, blocking his way and obscuring our view.

“Yes, Mr. Cage?” Salazar had finally made it through the maelstrom.

I kept my voice low, although the new arrivals were making quite a commotion.

“That woman by the door, the one with the flower on her lapel.”

He glanced over his shoulder, then frowned.

“By the door?”

The arrivals eased toward the back, clearing the view. The table was now empty.

“Wow,” David said. “That was awesome.”

“Never mind,” I said. The puzzled Salazar left to attend to the rowdy newcomers. If David hadn’t been there I might have wondered if I’d seen her at all, but now I was wondering if she was the woman with the Alsatian.

“Something I should probably tell you about this trip,” I said. “I may be doing some work over there that’s a little, well, unorthodox.”

“For Ealing Wharton?”

“God, no. I’d never stick my neck out for them. Freelance stuff. For Vanity Fair. ”

“Wow. You’re writing again?”

I was pleased by his excitement.

“Maybe. In fact, I’m looking into some old stuff from the Cold War.” I realized I’d said too much when he connected the dots right away.

“So do you think that woman with the carnation-”

“No. I don’t. But keep an eye on the house while I’m gone, if you don’t mind. Take all the books you want. If you get a strange text from me now and then, take it in stride, but don’t tell anyone else. And, for God’s sake, whatever you do-”

“Don’t tell Mom?”

“Yes.”

“I wouldn’t do that.” Then, as if something had suddenly occurred to him. “It’s that what you think I’ve been doing all these years? Reporting back to Mom?”

“No, not at all. It’s just that-”

“Is that why you never confide in me about, like, anything?”

“That’s not true.”

Or no more true than it had been for my own father. It then struck me that the children of divorce were the original double agents-faithful to two masters at once, yet almost certainly favoring one over the other in secret.

“David, I hope you realize how much I’ve always regretted that you grew up with only one parent in the house. I know it was never easy. For you or your mother.”

“You grew up that way. You seem to have turned out okay.”

“True. But death didn’t give my mother much choice.” I’d never told him that she ran out on us. “My exile was voluntary, and stupid.”

“You wish you’d stayed together?”

“I wish I’d been mature enough at the time to at least give it a try.”

“That’s pretty much what Mom says.”

Which didn’t make me feel any better. Even after sixteen years the judgment stung, mostly because it was true.

David forked in a mouthful of steak and followed it with potatoes. At least one of us still had an appetite. He was right. I’d never offered him much in the way of personal revelation, but maybe tonight was a start.