a kid could tell that her dad seemed pale and beleaguered, a man at the end of his rope, although I had no way of knowing that years earlier he’d suffered a nervous breakdown in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
A year later, after we moved back overseas to, of all places, Budapest, my father heard that Mr. Wisner had blown out his brains with a shotgun. I recall feeling bad for his daughter, and wondering if I could improve my standing with a sympathy card.
But my most vivid Georgetown memory was of an autumn afternoon just before my eighth birthday, when murder was the talk of the town. A woman was shot to death on the towpath of the C amp;O Canal, a pleasant greenway where everybody walked their dogs. The Post identified her as Mary Pinchot Meyer, sister-in-law of Benjamin Bradlee, who identified the body. All I knew of Mr. Bradlee was that he was the dad of a schoolmate a grade behind me, although the story said he was the Washington bureau chief for Newsweek, which sounded important. It felt strange seeing our neighbors’ names in a crime story, and I read over Dad’s shoulder as he drank his morning coffee.
“Shouldn’t you be getting ready for school, sport?”
“I’m done.”
“Teeth brushed?”
I bared them fiercely, and he turned back to his reading. A few seconds later he chuckled under his breath.
“What’s so funny?”
“Oh, it describes this poor woman’s ex-husband, Cord Meyer, as a ‘local author and lecturer.’ You remember Mr. Meyer, don’t you?”
I did, mostly because he was the only person I’d ever met named “Cord.” Still is.
“I thought he worked with Mr. Wisner?”
“He does. The paper is being discreet.”
“What’s ‘discreet’ mean?”
“You could look it up. Increase your word power, like in Reader’s Digest. ”
Dad hated Reader’s Digest, so I took it for a joke, although I didn’t get it.
“Don’t you be wandering over to the towpath. That’s police business, not yours. And if you cross Wisconsin Avenue on your bike, for God’s sake, walk it across.”
“Yes, sir.”
Naturally I made a beeline for the towpath after school on my red Galaxy Flyer. To my disappointment, there was no sign of the crime, so I set out for the next best destination-the victim’s art studio in the Bradlees’ garage, on an alley behind N Street. The Post had evocatively described a freshly painted canvas, still wet from her final brushstrokes, drying on an easel in front of an electric fan.
I negotiated a dogleg turn up the alley, and to my morbid delight the garage was wide open, revealing a roomful of canvases, including the one in front of the fan. What I hadn’t bargained for were the two men who turned abruptly at the sound of my approach.
One was Mr. Bradlee, who relaxed the moment he recognized me. But the other man, taller and thinner, stared with probing eyes from behind thick, horn-rimmed glasses. He acted more like a cop than a neighbor, and when he took a step in my direction I nearly fell off my bike. Fortunately Mr. Bradlee put out a hand to stop him.
“It’s all right, Jim. It’s Warfield Cage’s boy.” Then, to me: “It’s Bill, right?”
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry if-”
The man named Jim interrupted.
“This isn’t your business, son. That’s what your father would tell you.”
It probably wasn’t his, either, but I’d been taught not to talk back to adults.
“Yes, sir.”
Then he said the strangest thing, reminding me of one of those folk tales where the troll offers a riddle for safe passage:
“Remember, son. Caution is the eldest child of wisdom. Now run along.”
“Yes, sir.”
I was shaky in the saddle until I reached the wide open spaces of Thirty-third Street. When I described the encounter to Dad, he chuckled just like he had while reading the Post.
“Sounds like Mr. Angleton,” he said. “Quoting Victor Hugo, no less.”
“Who’s he?”
“Victor Hugo?”
“Mr. Angleton.”
“Oh, sort of an ‘author and lecturer,’ like Mr. Meyer.”
“Why was he in that lady’s room?”
“Looking for secrets, I’d imagine. That’s mostly what he writes and lectures about.”
“What kind of secrets?”
“They wouldn’t be secrets if he went around telling everybody, would they?”
Not until my thirties did I find out from some book what they’d really been up to. By then I was working for Bradlee, who’d become executive editor of the Post, and I’d long since learned that Jim Angleton had been the CIA’s chief counterspy. They’d been looking for Mary Meyer’s diary, which described her affair with the late President Kennedy. Since she was something of a lefty, Angleton may also have wanted to scan it for clues to assist his infamous Great Mole Hunt, a paranoid quest in which he ruined the careers of so many trustworthy CIA men that he, too, was eventually forced out.
They found the diary. Bradlee gave it to Angleton, who promised to destroy it. Instead, telling no one, he stashed it in his files.
So that was my neighborhood, a high-toned ghetto of spies and policy makers. And here I was now, decades later, crossing the shadows of its maples and dogwoods as I zeroed in on yet another cache of secrets.
In case you’re wondering how I figured out the location, it was a breeze once I read the opening lines of Ashenden. The key sentence was right there on page one:
On the house at which Ashenden had been asked to call there was a board up to announce that it was for sale, the shutters were closed and there was no sign that anyone lived in it.
The passage perfectly described a detached house on P Street that my neighbors and I had long been complaining about. It had been gutted for renovation, then the developer went broke and boarded up the windows. In Georgetown you didn’t do that, so we raised a stink. City Hall finally sent a crew to replace the boards with tasteful shutters and post a “For Sale” sign. It had to be the place.
Normally a porch light was burning, but tonight the house was dark. As I crossed the tiny lawn I saw why- someone had removed the bulb. The front door had one of those big padlocks favored by real estate agents. Based on Folly’s tradecraft, I was looking for a yellow chalk mark on the bricks, but there was nothing out front. I went around to the left and spotted a yellow slash just below the rearmost window. I glanced back at the neighboring house, a mere fifteen feet away. The last thing I needed was someone reporting me to the cops, but all was quiet. The shutters were unlocked, and the sash opened easily when I pressed up against the glass. I climbed through the opening into an empty room that smelled of sawdust and fresh plaster.
I closed the shutters behind me and turned on the flashlight. Sweeping the walls with the beam, I spotted a buff-colored envelope propped on the mantelpiece like a note left for Santa. I fetched it, every footstep a hollow thud. Then it was time to leave, unless I wanted to become a poster boy for Neighborhood Watch.
In my impatience to get home, I ignored tradecraft and took the most direct route. As if to punish my haste, someone called out from behind me just as I reached my street.
“You’re out late tonight, Bill.”
It was the woman with the Alsatian, maybe thirty yards behind me at the end of the block. The dog was lit by the streetlamp, but she was in shadow.
“I am. And your name is…?”
“Mail service is so slow these days. But I’m glad you finally got delivery.”
She and the dog set off briskly in the opposite direction. I hurried after them, full of questions. But as soon as she rounded the corner a rear door opened on a car at the curb. No dome light, no headlights. I broke into a run as they climbed in. A black Lincoln Town Car, the kind embassies used, but the tags were unlit. The car pulled away.
