at another address, which was also relayed by phone, some voice telling me that my shirts were ready. There was a code. The name of the cleaner’s was always the street, and the stated price was the address.”
“Not very sophisticated.”
“Not if the line was bugged. But the embassy checked pretty regularly in those days.”
“Who was the ‘they’ in all this?”
“You can probably guess.”
“The Agency?”
“That was always my assumption.”
“Then tell me one thing. A truthful answer, straight up yes or no.”
“If I can.”
“Were you CIA?”
“No.”
He said it immediately and without wavering, his eyes looking straight into mine. His face and hands were calm, no gestures to betray either nerves or uncertainty. Then why did I still not believe him? He must have sensed my doubt, because he then opened up in a way he never had before.
“Look. When I say no, I mean absolutely, unequivocally no. But at various postings I was State’s liaison to the Agency. It’s unofficial. You’ll damn well never find it in Foreign Service job listings, but every embassy has one, and when you and I were living in Europe, I was usually the guy. So I did a few chores for them. It came with the job.”
“Like those meetings we used to go to, with those men who never gave their names?”
“What?”
“C’mon. You don’t remember dragging me to all those bars and cafes?”
He seemed annoyed.
“I met lots of old friend in cafes and bars. No doubt I sometimes took you along. But I wasn’t meeting spies for the Agency. Other than those few courier assignments, I never knowingly did anything for the Agency beyond a little consular paperwork-cleaning up a few passports, doling out visas for some of their emigres, that sort of thing.”
Well, that was one youthful illusion shattered, provided he was telling the truth. Then he had a question for me
“This package Christoph gave you-did you open it? Because that’s certainly something I never did.”
“Never?”
“Why risk finding out something that could get me in trouble? What if I’d been hauled in for questioning by some foreign government? I might’ve lost my job, or worse. Was I curious? Sure, but never tempted. And I believe I asked you a question.”
“Yes, I opened it. I took it down the street to a little Konditorei and sat in the back. It was nothing special. A German translation of London’s Own. Fourth printing of the paperback edition, unsigned.”
I withheld the part about “Dewey” and the enclosed message. If he offered more maybe I’d reciprocate.
“Right after I opened it I was accosted by this strange old troll who must have followed me from Kurzmann’s. His name was Lothar, and he sent you his regards.”
Dad surprised me by smiling broadly.
“The one and only? German fellow, looked like he might have just pulled an all-nighter with Mick and the Stones?”
“With a cane that he taps like a telegraph.”
“Complete affectation, but he’s entitled. Lothar Heinemann is a legend. Book scout extraordinaire.”
“Book scout?”
“How do you think I tracked down half my collection?” He waved an arm toward his shelves. “Some of the choicest finds were his. Ask Lothar to find a needle in a haystack and he’ll be back inside a week with five to choose from, plus a sewing box. He’s a genius. The problem is finding him. And, frankly, keeping him sober.”
“Booze?”
“Worse. Although I hear he’s been clean for years. Used to be very popular with Agency people. Ran off the rails for a while in the early seventies, but by then he was out of my price range. Too many other people wanted the same kind of stuff.”
“Agency people collect spy novels?”
“God, yes. At least half a dozen, to hear Lothar tell it, but I could never get him to spill any names. Lothar was always pretty cagey about who he was scouting for. But I do know one collector who never hired him. Edwin Lemaster.”
“ He was a collector?”
Dad gave me a smug look that suggested I should’ve know all along.
“That’s how we became friends, since you’ve always wanted to know. Talking about books. I was a little surprised he didn’t bring it up back in eighty-four.”
Finally.
“So where did you meet? And what year?”
“Oh, it must have been the late fifties. But I didn’t get to know him all that well until later, around sixty- seven. He’d just started writing Knee Knockers when we ran into each other at a bookstore in Budapest. He wasn’t comfortable telling the Agency about his little writing project, understandably, so I became a sounding board for his ideas-the plot, the characters. He loved the genre as much as I did, and wanted to be a part of it. I remember the day well. It was at Bela Szondi’s old store on Corvin Square.”
“Didn’t you send me there once to pick up a package? Wrapped in butcher paper, even?”
“I’m sure it was more than once.”
So I was right.
“Those were Agency errands?”
“Lord, no. Do you really think I’d have dispatched my ten-year-old on a mission for the CIA?”
A second illusion now lay in ruins, albeit one I’d concocted only that morning. Obviously my childhood hadn’t been as exciting as I thought, and I could only smile at my overactive imagination. It was the fault of those books on his shelves. Gazing up at them now, I easily recalled the way they’d once fired my youthful fantasies.
I knew the vital statistics of his collection by heart: 218 novels by 47 authors. Eighteen had worked for intelligence agencies, six more for a foreign ministry or a war office, so you knew the pages were spiked with disguised secrets.
By now you may have concluded it was mostly a Cold War library. While that aptly describes the ones I read as a teen, his holdings were far broader and deeper. More than a quarter of his first editions were published before 1950, and even The Riddle of the Sands, from 1903, wasn’t nearly the oldest.
There was Rudyard Kipling’s Kim from 1901, with its Great Game intrigues of British India, and William Le Queux’s Strange Tales of a Nihilist from 1892. The oldest was James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy from 1821, a tale of a double agent for George Washington. Dad’s two-volume copy was so fragile that he’d placed it off-limits, which made me curious enough at the age of fifteen to track down a reprint in an embassy library. I realized by the second sentence, which ran to a breathtaking eighty-five words, that I’d never finish. Yet it was Cooper’s first bestseller, and he showed surprising prescience about the future of spying by having Washington tell the hero, “You must descend into the grave with the reputation of a foe to your native land. Remember that the veil which conceals your true character cannot be raised in years-perhaps never.”
You’ve probably never heard of most of the earliest authors, but some were hugely popular. Le Queux, for one, although to me he was a hack. Manning Coles, of the Tommy Hambledon books, took the quality up a notch, as did John Buchan, and then Ambler. And of course there was Joseph Conrad, who not only produced The Secret Agent in 1907, but a 1911 sequel, Under Western Eyes.
It was only in the mid-fifties that Cold War tales came into vogue, and even those were dominated for years by a pair of rakish Brits-Ian Fleming’s James Bond and Desmond Cory’s Johnny Fedora. Fedora is largely forgotten now, but he was in print two years before Bond. JFK made all the difference for Fleming when the dashing young president revealed he was a Bond fan. Sales took off, and Hollywood took notice. Fleming also had the better pedigree, having worked in British intelligence with everyone from Kim Philby to Graham Greene.
Dad harrumphed that Fedora and Bond were “cartoons for the drunk and oversexed,” yet he collected all
