“Where are we supposed to take it?” I called after him.
He kept walking, hands in pockets as he rose briskly up the incline and disappeared to the right. I looked back at Litzi, who shrugged. We picked our way to the car, the dome lights showing the way. It was a Mercedes S450 sedan with German tags from Hamburg. But, as I later discovered, there were no ownership papers. There was a folder on the driver’s seat along with a folded road map, a set of printed directions, and a hand-drawn diagram.
“For Mr. William Furse” was printed across the top of the directions.
“Furse?” Litzi said. “Is that a mistake?”
“Probably my code name for the evening. William Furse was a character in The Double Game. ”
“And what became of him?”
“Nothing, thank goodness. He even showed up in a later book, still in one piece.”
“How refreshing.”
“Do you know anything about checking brakes?” I asked.
“To see if they’re working?”
“Or if they’ve been tampered with.”
She shook her head.
Neither did I. I got out anyway and crouched on the ground to peer beneath the car, hoping to see if anything looked cut, or leaky, or was dangling from the undercarriage. But it was too dark to see a thing, so I brushed off my knees and climbed back in.
“Well?”
“I’ll try them out once we’re under way. Maybe I’ll go a little slower for a while.”
“In Prague traffic that shouldn’t be a problem.”
I opened the folder.
The first thing I saw was a page from the Le Carre novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Written atop it in the familiar block lettering was a name, Valerie Humphries. Part of the novel was marked off below. The passage introduced one of my favorite of Le Carre’s minor characters-Connie Sachs, the crusty maven of records and research for British Intelligence. She was famous for her encyclopedic memory and attention to detail, especially with regard to anyone who had ever even winked at the KGB, or operated within their sphere of influence-especially those chosen few who she enjoyed referring to as “Moscow Centre hoods.” She drank heavily, played favorites, scorned the dolts who ran the Circus, and was thoroughly, girlishly devoted to the brilliant and beleaguered George Smiley.
Litzi read the paragraphs over my shoulder.
“She sounds like an alcoholic. Is that what this Humphries woman is like?”
“Maybe. Why don’t you Google her? While you’re at it, shoot a message to my father. See what he can find out about the email address for K-Fresh 62.”
Litzi pulled out her smartphone and got to work while I studied the map and the directions, which pointed us onto a tangle of highways that lead out of the city, then into the countryside before we were supposed to turn onto a dirt driveway from a rural road some forty miles northwest of Prague. Our destination was up in the hills where farmers grew hops for all that pilsner, and where their forebears had built castles like the one Kafka put in his novel.
The diagram depicted what seemed to be a farming estate, with a long, winding driveway that snaked past a barn and several outbuildings before reaching a rectangular house beside a pond. Presumably this was where we’d find Valerie Humphries. Whether she would be glad to see us was another matter.
“We’re going to have to leave this cave before I can get a signal,” Litzi said.
“At your service.”
I turned the key. A hundred thousand euros’ worth of German engineering hummed to life, answering the throb of the river.
“I hope old Valerie keeps late hours. The way I figure it, we won’t get there until almost ten. Maybe by then one of Dad’s buddies will have figured out who my handler is from that email address.”
“How do you knows she’s old?”
“Well, if she’s at all like Connie Sachs…”
We eased through the open gate. At the top of the incline I rolled down the windows for fresh air. I glanced around for any cars waiting to follow us. Seeing none, I accelerated.
“You navigate,” I said. Litzi picked up the map.
No sooner had we turned onto the boulevard alongside the river than the heavens opened, and within seconds, rain was sheeting the windshield. Even with the wipers at full tilt, the night was a watery blur. The brakes seemed fine. So far.
Traffic inched along in the downpour, but Litzi kept us entertained by reading aloud from an old Newsweek story from 1994 that she found online. Headlined “The Lady Takes Down a Tramp,” it was an insider account of how a Humphries-led research team had helped expose the traitorous CIA agent Hamilton Hargraves. And of course the story couldn’t resist comparing her to Le Carre’s Connie Sachs.
“Ninety-four,” I said. “Twenty years too late for Jim Angleton. I wonder if she’s old enough to have met him before he was sacked.”
Litzi scrolled through the text.
“He’s not mentioned. But the story says she was fifty-seven, definitely old enough.”
“Meaning now she’s seventy-three. Hope she still has all her marbles.”
“Why send you to see her? Couldn’t your handler have talked to her just as easily?”
“Maybe she’s come up with something new that she’ll only discuss in person. Or maybe it’s just to further my education, so I’ll know what to do next. As long as she’s not another fake Russian, that will be an improvement.”
The rain slackened as we reached the outskirts of the city, then fell harder as we eased into the darkness of the countryside. We missed a turn, getting lost enough that we had to backtrack ten miles, and by the time we finally pulled onto the gravel driveway it was nearly ten-thirty. The rural night was black behind its screen of rain, and the country lane was so rutted and mushy that once I nearly got stuck, fishtailing the rear wheels. Finally our beams lit the walls of a two-story stone farmhouse with a pitched shingle roof. There were four mullioned windows across the front of each floor, but only one was lit, downstairs and to the right. There was a separate garage with both doors shut, so we parked in the mush and sprinted for the door.
An overflowing gutter cascaded across the front. We took shelter on a small porch and I knocked loudly. An outside light came on, one of those yellow bulbs for keeping away bugs. A deadbolt slid back before the door eased free.
Any illusion I’d had of meeting a dissipated old drunk, gone to seed like Connie, was immediately dispelled. Valerie Humphries was in remarkable shape, her posture upright, every silver hair in place. But the real surprise was that I recognized her-she was the “Val” from the funeral on Block Island, the one who’d called Lemaster a “pariah” and had then been talking to Nethercutt’s wife.
Fortunately, she didn’t seem to recognize me, although she did inspect us both from head to toe. She wore a smart black wool skirt, a cream-colored blouse, and a string of pearls, the kind of older woman my father used to call “well preserved” when he was part of the embassy social scene. I would’ve wagered she dressed like this every night, one of those exacting personalities who demanded as much from herself as from those around her. As she looked us over, she seemed far less impressed with us than we were with her.
“I suppose you’re Mr. Furse,” she said, employing the code name.
“Yes. Sorry for the late arrival.”
“Come in.”
I introduced Litzi, but changed her last name to Hauptmann. Humphries raised her eyebrows at the first name, and I was pretty sure I knew why.
“No one warned me about you,” she said to Litzi as she ushered us in. “I can’t say that I enjoy these surprises, but I’m not the one who makes the plans, and never have been. I’d offer you coffee but the cook is asleep, and if I wake him there’ll be hell to pay. Mine is undrinkable, so Burgundy will have to do.”
“Burgundy would be generous,” I said.
Especially since, with Connie Sachs, Smiley had to provide all the alcohol. The hard stuff, too, as an
