mysterious presence had stuck with me long after I finished the book. Here is the English version of what Litzi read:
I saw him standing on the platform as the train drew in: a short, dark, flabby man in rimless glasses and a tight seersucker suit with an array of fountain pens in his handkerchief pocket. Under his arm he carried a thin, black dispatch case with a silver medallion hanging from the zipper tag. He stood by a pillar gazing about him with the imperious anxiety of a wealthy traveler who sees no porter and knows that he cannot carry his own baggage. I think it was the fountain pens that identified him for me. He wore them like a badge.
Litzi’s eyes widened. Then she put a hand to her mouth and laughed.
“Oh, my God! So now I’m living in a novel, too?”
“As a librarian, you should be honored.”
“Archivist. Dealing with facts. When I was a girl I read Emil and the Detectives, just like everyone else. Then I grew up. But this is quite a coincidence.”
“It’s intentional. It’s my handler’s way of telling me how well he knows me. He’s been yanking my chain, and now he’s yanking yours.”
“But what if I’d never checked the video?”
“You did, though. That’s what matters, and he was ready for it. He had his man dress for the occasion, just like he was playing a role.” I took the book from her hands, hefting it like Exhibit A for the prosecution, although I wasn’t yet sure of the charges, much less of the suspect. “Obviously someone is taking this very seriously.”
“May I ask a question?”
“Of course.”
“Why are you doing this? If it’s serious, like you say, then why take the risk just to go chasing after your past? Isn’t the present enough for you?”
“Do you think that’s all this is?”
“Certainly it’s part of it. Your interview with Lemaster. Your father’s little missions to the bookstore. Me. It’s almost like an analyst was taking you back through a series of repressed memories.”
“I never repressed any memories about you.”
“Didn’t you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’ve always hidden things from both of us. So have I.”
“We have?”
She shook her head, like she couldn’t quite believe I didn’t agree. Or maybe she was just being Litzi, provocative for its own sake, the way she’d always been.
“You Austrians. A nation of Freuds.”
“You Americans. So innocent about the world, except when you’re trying to run it.”
That sort of broke the mood. We left the bookstore and wandered aimlessly up the block. She briefly took my hand, squeezing it as if to make peace, but neither of us said much for a minute or two. I think we realized we’d reached a crossing point. It was time to either say good-bye or find some pretext to keep the day going.
I knew which option I preferred, although the sealed envelope tucked beneath my left arm was making demands of its own. Litzi checked her watch.
“My office must be wondering if my appointment is ever going to end.”
“You could always text them again.”
“Saying what?”
“That you’re meeting an old friend for a drink.”
She stopped in the middle of the block. Pedestrians eased around us. I watched her face as she considered what to say next.
“And after we have this drink, what then? Dinner? Probably with another drink, or a bottle of wine? Then we go back to my apartment to talk about how wonderful things used to be. And maybe then, because we are both lonely and unattached, we decide to make love for old times’ sake, or for new times’ sake, or for however we decide to justify it. Is that what you have in mind?”
I knew better than to answer. This was the Litzi I remembered, frank and analytical, offering the good with the bad in equal doses, whether you were ready or not. She picked up the thread on her own, as I’d known she would.
“No matter what may have brought us together, Bill, we are not living in one of your old books, and I am not some sort of second chance. I have loved many times since we knew each other, and some of those men meant far more to me than you ever did. My husband’s name was Klaus, and if my womb had not fallen to pieces then we would have raised sons and daughters, more than you could count. So I suppose what I am saying is that, while this is very nice, I don’t wish for either of us to be burdened by expectations.”
I smiled, which seemed to surprise her.
“I’m glad you still get straight to the point, Litzi. Although you’ve thought things through a little further along than I have. Not that I object to where you ended up, with the two of us in bed. But in the life I’ve been leading, sometimes a drink is just a drink. So would you like to have one, or should we call it a day and leave the rest to our memories, repressed or not?”
She smiled back.
“I’d forgotten how easily you could always disarm me. Me and my Austrian earnestness.” She took my arm. We resumed walking. “Let’s have that drink, and then dinner. Then you can take me home, but I won’t invite you upstairs. If you’re still around tomorrow? Well, maybe. But for tonight, how about Restaurant Sperl?”
“God, no. My dad stuffed me full of schnitzel last night at Figlmuller. And if we go to Sperl we really will talk about old times. I’d rather hear about all these men who were so much better than me. Pick someplace new.”
We still talked plenty about the past, of course. All the while the envelope remained with us, unopened, like an unstamped passport for entry to the rest of the week. Neither of us mentioned it until around nine o’clock, after our waiter had poured the last of the wine she’d so accurately predicted we would drink.
“I think it’s time,” she said, nodding toward it. I’d placed it on the table. The waiter had put the bill on top of it, but I knew she wasn’t referring to paying.
“I think so, too. Drum roll, please.”
“No drum roll. It would sound too much like a firing squad.”
“Oh, I doubt it will be that grim.”
But when I slipped the paper free I saw right away that the tone of this message was more somber and urgent than that of the ones before it. My handler was raising the stakes.
“TAKE HEED!” was handwritten in block letters atop a book page that had been sliced neatly from a copy of Le Carre’s Smiley’s People. Not another first edition, I hoped. There were two pages from the book, and a third from another novel. On the Smiley pages, three brief passages were marked in black ink. Taken as one item, they read like this:
“Moscow rules. I insist Moscow Rules.”
“And what were the contact procedures exactly?” Smiley asked.
“The safety signal was one new drawing-pin shoved high in the first wood support on the left as you entered.”
“And the counter-signal?” Smiley asked.
But he knew the answer already.
“A yellow chalk line,” said Mostyn.
Handwritten afterward, again in block letters, was a street name, “Kollnerhofgasse,” but no number, and no date or time.
“Does this mean you’re supposed to meet someone?” Litzi asked.
“Looks like it. And by Moscow Rules. I guess they want me to make sure I’m not being followed.”
The third page came from a copy of the novel Spy Wednesday, by William Hood, an ex-spy who began his CIA career in Vienna, where he helped run a Soviet double agent in the 1950s. He had ended it as one of James Angleton’s top deputies-so there was Angleton’s ghost yet again. After retiring, Hood had helped former CIA director Richard Helms write his memoirs. When he wrote about spy tradecraft, you could bank on its authenticity, and a tidy example of that was staring up at me from the excised page, in two marked passages:
Earlier that week, Roger Kyle had seen the numerals 3-4-7 jotted boldly across the top of page 222 of volume
