Shortly after one thirty I reached my dad’s stately old building, a block off the Graben in the Hofburg quarter. I pressed the button by his name, shoved open the door on his answering buzz, then rode the tiny caged elevator to five. He was waiting in the hall dressed in his usual Sunday uniform of tan corduroys and a blue Oxford.
“The prodigal returns!” His stock greeting. “Let me take your bag, you must be exhausted.”
He had laid on quite a spread. On the dining room table was a beaded pitcher of orange juice next to a carafe of coffee. Slices of meat and cheese were arrayed like playing cards on a china platter alongside a basket of croissants and bowls of yogurt, muesli, and sliced fruit. A full Vienna Fruhstuck, even at this hour, and the gesture was touching. It reminded me of how anxious I’d been to please David two days earlier, and I wondered if parents ever stopped feeling as if they needed to launch a charm offensive whenever their grown children came home.
“I hope you’re hungry, or would you like a lie-down first?” Using the British term.
“I’ll eat. It looks great. Then a shower, maybe. But I need to stay vertical.”
“Of course. Your stoical approach to jet lag. Here, let’s take your plate to the living room where it’s not so damn gloomy. I’ll bring the coffee.”
He drew open the blinds to a view of old rooftops beneath brooding clouds.
“A cross-country sky,” he said. “Isn’t that what you used to call days like this?”
“I did. Looks like one of those days when our coach would run us ten miles through the Vienna woods.”
I could smell the trail as I said it-black mud and fallen leaves. Dad had come to all my races, screaming with surprising passion for a sport he’d never known. I think he appreciated its perfect meritocracy. No manner of favoritism or fakery could make you finish even a second faster. To a diplomat, that must have seemed miraculous.
“Reading anything good?”
His favorite question, and with the perfect backdrop. Bookshelves lined the two walls that got the least sunlight, so the bindings wouldn’t fade. The espionage first editions were on the far left, easy to spot by the shiny plastic covers over the dust jackets, the mark of a collector, although he’d read every copy at least twice. Dad certainly wouldn’t have needed hours to remember Tommy Hambledon, and it again occurred to me that he might be playing at least an advisory role for my mysterious controller.
“Funny you should ask,” I said. “I’ve been going through some old Lemasters.”
“You make it sound more like business than pleasure.”
“In a way, it is.”
“How so?”
“Are you sure you don’t already know?”
He frowned, puzzled. It seemed genuine.
“I’m here on a freelance assignment. Trying to ease back into a little journalism.”
“Wonderful!” He’d hated it when I gave up writing, and he almost never asked about my work at Ealing Wharton. “What’s the story?”
“Something you might be able to help me with. Vanity Fair wants a piece on the espionage career of Edwin Lemaster. That’s why I’ve been going through the books. Searching for clues to what he was really up to.”
Dad wrinkled his nose.
“Who put you on to this?”
The one question I didn’t want to answer. Dad was as sharp as ever.
“I got a tip in the mail. Anonymous.”
“The most reckless kind, for all concerned. Didn’t you take a big enough bite out of him the first time?”
“You act like that was my fault.”
He shrugged. I sipped coffee, waiting to see if he’d take sides. Maybe he already had.
“You know, I came across a review a few years ago that dated his entire decline as a novelist to that interview of yours.”
“Never saw it.”
But I had, of course, and one particular paragraph had lodged in my mind:
Ever since his “confession,” Lemaster has lost his edge, seemingly more interested in proving his loyalty than in honing his craft. His latest book, a techno-thriller in which Uncle Sam’s minions are portrayed only in the brightest hues of red, white and blue, completes his descent into mediocrity.
“The funny thing,” Dad said, “is that Agency people didn’t even raise an eyebrow about the whole confessional part.”
“Really?”
“It was his other slip that pissed them off.”
“There was another slip?”
“Think about it. Think of everything he told you.”
I did. I drew a blank until my father filled it in.
“‘I was looking for the Don Tollesons of the world.’ He was a mole hunter.”
“Well, yeah. That was pretty obvious.”
“And what does that tell you about who he worked for?”
“The Soviet desk?”
“Oh, come on.”
“Jim Angleton?” My father smiled but said nothing. “I didn’t think Counterintelligence had its own field men. Not overseas, anyway.”
“Nobody else thought so, either, including most of the CIA.”
“So it was off the books?”
“Everyone’s except Angleton’s, which he kept in a safe.”
Angleton yet again. Dead for more than twenty years, yet still coming up in my memories, and in my conversations with both David and Dad. And why not? Everything I’d ever read about him made him sound like the bizarre creation of some novelist, which of course made him seem real, eternal. He was the original Cold Warrior, one of the first to play the postwar game again the Soviets and play it well. In his hobbies, as in his work, he was a detail man, a miniaturist-tying flies, breeding orchids, combing files, hunting moles, deconstructing poems. Deeply suspicious, yet blinded by Anglophilia and his friendship with Kim Philby, whose betrayal drove him over the edge. And now I’d learned that Ed Lemaster had secretly worked for him.
“Turns out,” Dad continued, “that Angleton had three operatives, all of them ostensibly employed by the Soviet desk but in reality reporting to him. Which meant they were paid twice, of course.”
“So even within the Agency they were double agents, sort of.”
“That’s certainly how the Soviet desk saw it. Angleton called them his ‘flying squad.’ Apparently only a few of his assistants knew about it.”
“Where’d you hear all this, the funeral?” He smiled cagily. “No wonder I couldn’t get anything out of you at dinner.”
“Of course, by the time Lemaster let the cat out of the bag in that interview, Angleton had been in retirement eleven years. But there was still hell to pay. You saw what those people were like. They still argue about crap that happened in 1948, so you can imagine what kind of a row they’d have over-”
He was interrupted by a ringing telephone, a land line jangling down the hall in his bedroom. It startled us both, but him even more. He looked over at the clock on an end table, then back at me, then again at the clock, which seemed strange, but I said nothing. It was exactly two o’clock.
The phone continued to ring.
“Excuse me,” he said, sounding shaken. He headed off toward his bedroom. I took up a position at the end of the hall to listen.
“Cage,” he said, answering in the Austrian style. There was a pause. Then, sternly and in German: “No. This is Warfield, but William is here. Are you sure that’s who you wish to speak to? Very well.”
Then, louder and in English: “Bill, it’s for you.”
His brow was creased as he handed me the receiver. He hovered in the doorway as I answered, rude by his standards.
“This is William Cage.”
I turned my back for privacy, but sensed his lingering presence. I’d been back for half an hour and we were already spying on each other. The answering voice was neither tense nor urgent. It was an older man, Viennese
