“I suppose now you’re going to tell me you’re married with eleven children.”
“One husband, an ex. No children, I’m sorry to say.”
“I have an ex as well. But a son, he’s eighteen.”
“Lucky you.”
“I am lucky, even though he grew up mostly with his mother.”
I thought of my parting conversation with David, and wondered what he would think of this little scene, and of Litzi.
“Let’s have lunch,” she said. “Buy a baguette and eat in the park. It’s too nice a day to go back indoors.”
I immediately agreed.
I suppose I should have wondered right then how my handler had managed to bring about this reunion, and how he knew so much about my past. But for the moment, on a beautiful morning with Litzi’s arm through mine, my mind was on anything but spying.
So off we went to lunch, heedless of anyone but ourselves.
9
Had you asked me to predict how Litzi would look after all this time, I would have erred on the side of frumpy. As a girl she had her mother’s fair complexion and blond hair, but her mother was also a standard-issue hausfrau, stout and sturdy, with a face as puffy as bread dough. Her father, from Bohemia, was thinner, with hollow eyes and prominent cheekbones, the face of a refugee. It was clear now that Litzi had borrowed the best from both sides. Fair complexion, but with features winnowed to their essentials. A few worry lines, but not enough to shake her air of earnest calm, although there did seem to be a hint of past disappointment in the depths of her eyes. Her blond hair was touched by gray, but she still had the posture of a dancer, lithe and graceful. It made me wonder how I was measuring up, then I told myself to stop, that we were far beyond that now.
We bought sandwiches at a bakery and walked to a park on the far side of the National Library, where ravens stalked the green and cawed for handouts. We sat at the base of a fountain and talked for a while about our lives and our jobs and what had become of the years while the water gurgled behind us. Then she nodded toward the sealed envelope, which lay at my feet in the grass.
“Well, are you going to tell me what this is all about?”
In all those spy novels, of course, the oldest and best advice was to trust no one. The same was true when I’d been a journalist, and more so at Ealing Wharton, where your level of mistrust was roughly proportionate to your annual bonus. But I had long ago noticed something about people who followed this advice. All of them seemed to wind up alone. I knew because I was one of them.
Today, I decided, I would act sixteen again, if only for the afternoon, if only for Litzi, and if only because for the moment I no longer wanted to be alone. Besides, she and I had lived through a lot together, some of it anything but child’s play. If anyone had been battle-tested to protect my secrets, it was Litzi Strauss.
“How much time do you have?”
“As much as we need. While you were buying lunch I texted my office. They believe I’m at an urgent appointment that will keep me away for most of the afternoon.”
“Do you remember all those Edwin Lemaster books my father had?”
She rolled her eyes and smiled, a wary but willing audience. I continued talking, and told her everything. She didn’t interrupt once, and was silent for a while when I finished.
“Amazing,” she finally said. “In my work I sometimes spend hours going through old letters, or some diary from centuries ago, and I’m always struck by how much those people come to life for me. But these are made-up characters you’re talking about, yet it’s like they’ve stepped right off the page. It makes me wish I’d been there to meet the fellow who delivered the envelope to me. He looked so strange.”
“You saw him?”
“I wasn’t supposed to. Karl, my friend in Salzburg, told me someone would drop it at the library’s reception desk with my name on it.”
I turned over the envelope. “Litzi Strauss” was written in the same blocky handwriting that had been on the parcel from Kurzmann’s.
“I figured it would probably be delivered by a courier service, but the other arrangements were so strange that I wanted to check, just in case, so I asked our man at the reception desk to note the exact time when the envelope was delivered. Later I checked the day’s footage from the security cameras, and there he was.”
“You’re a natural, Litzi.”
She smiled shyly. “Maybe I am. And it was no courier service, let me tell you! You should have seen him. A chilly morning on the first of October and he’s wearing an undersized summer-weight suit of that crinkly blue and white material you only seem to see in America.”
“Seersucker?”
“Yes! Seersucker.”
Something tugged at a hook deep in the pond of memory, but Litzi was off and running.
“The front pocket of his jacket was stuffed with pens, a whole row. At first I even thought he was wearing some kind of ID badge, but no, it was all pens.”
Whatever had been nibbling at my subconscious now struck with full force. I began reeling it to the surface.
“A seersucker, you said.”
“Yes.”
“With a pocketful of pens?”
“Yes.”
“Was he wearing glasses?”
“Sort of an old-fashioned pair.”
“And he was fat?”
“Maybe not fat, but a little overweight. Soft-looking. Do you know him?”
“Was he carrying anything else?”
She thought about it.
“A briefcase. A thin one, with a big tag.”
“Unbelievable.”
“You do know him.”
“Where’s the nearest bookstore?”
“Only a few blocks, you know Vienna. Why? Who was he?”
“I have to show you something.”
She impatiently led the way to a Buchladen that was far neater than Kurzmann’s. All the while she pressed me for answers, but I didn’t want to spoil the surprise, and was hoping my memory wasn’t playing tricks on me.
I made a beeline for the novels and checked the A’s, for Ambler, Eric. Fortunately his books have made a comeback in recent years. You can now find paperback reprints both in the U.S. and abroad. A German version would be fine, as long as they had a copy.
“What are you doing?” Litzi asked for what must have been the third time.
“Looking for your courier.”
And there he was, right next to a copy of A Coffin for Dimitrios. Or, rather, there was the book, Judgment on Deltchev, a fine little novel from early in the Cold War that Ambler had published in 1951. I’d read it cover to cover on the train from Prague to Vienna a week before turning fifteen.
I took it down and flipped through the pages. If I was correct, the reference came fairly early. Yes, there it was on the first page of the second chapter. I handed it to Litzi.
“Last paragraph. Read it.”
The passage describes the novel’s hero, Foster, as he arrives in an unnamed Eastern European capital, where he is met by Georghi Pashik, a shifty man of mixed loyalties. Pashik played a pivotal role in the plot, and his
