Brake lights glowed briefly as it paused at the next intersection, then it sped off.
Now what kind of tradecraft was that, tipping off a target to surveillance? It felt more like thug behavior than espionage. Or was it a signal that someone would be guarding my flanks? Either way, I’d been put on notice. But why would someone with the resources to hire a burglar, a tail, and a driver with a limo need me? Maybe the envelope would tell me.
I shut the blinds, settled onto the couch, and slit open the envelope. Two pages were inside-generic white paper, although the typing was all too familiar. How many hours had this person spent on my Royal? The words “Use on line 11” were typed on the first page above a long strand of paired numbers, presumably for the book code. But in what book? And on what page?
Those questions were answered on the second sheet, although I gasped at its contents. A yellowed page 93, torn roughly from Lemaster’s first novel, Knee Knockers, was pasted to the paper. So was a sliced-out square from the book’s copyright page, which showed that the book was a first edition from 1969. More typescript was below.
This certainly ruled out my father as a suspect. He would sooner torture a small animal than carve up a cherished first edition. If tearing a page out of an old book sounds like no big deal, consider that a first edition of Knee Knockers now fetches up to $5,000, double that if it’s signed. A defaced volume is practically worthless. Mercenary considerations aside, to any bibliophile this was an act of malice, and it told me that someone was harboring quite a grudge, against either Lemaster or the owner of the book.
But enough of that. There was a book code to decipher, and the numbers were my guide. In each pair, the first one told me which word to count to on line 11, and the second told me which letter to use. Soon enough I had the message:
You were halfway there in eighty four. Finish the job. Instructions on line seventeen.
Line seventeen began a passage of dialogue between Folly and operative Karl Breeden:
“How long do you think I’ll need?” Breeden asked.
“Maybe two weeks,” Folly said. “Three tops.”
“Any travel?”
“Vienna for sure. Probably Budapest. We’ll communicate through the usual channels. Stay where you always do. Use the code name Dewey.”
“And from there?”
“Await my instructions in Vienna. I’ll be in touch.”
Clearly, these were my marching orders. Just as clearly, my quarry was Edwin Lemaster, or rather, the Lemaster who had once worked for the CIA. The message signed off with a sort of warning, typed at the bottom of the second sheet:
Management not responsible if you end up like Mr. Hambledon’s description on p. 78.
Hambledon. The name rang a bell, but I couldn’t place it. I checked page 78 of Knee Knockers and The Double Game, but came up empty. I flipped through Ashenden in case a Hambledon played a minor role, but he wasn’t there, either. Hambledon. I had read it long ago, but for the moment it was lost in the fog of memory.
The mantel clock struck two. Practical matters began to intervene. Ealing Wharton needed me in top form tomorrow, and I would be lucky to get four hours of sleep. I was due to testify on Capitol Hill on behalf of our newest client, makers of the Lattelicious Superluxe, a milk frother implicated in a dozen house fires. Some congressman, scenting an easy opportunity for publicity, had called for a hearing to examine how our client and its regulators had allowed such shoddy merchandise onto store shelves. My job was to take the heat alongside our client’s CEO, who was as clueless about PR as his technical people were about wiring. We were meeting at seven to prepare.
But all I could think about as I climbed into bed was whether I should continue this spy hunt, and if so, how quickly I might arrange time off for a trip to Europe. Vienna, of all places. Home not only to my dad, but to my richest boyhood memories.
I was being used, of course. I had no illusions about that. I had often watched my firm’s managing director, Marty Ealing, entice some congressman or other to do his bidding with a similar blend of flattery, intrigue, and misdirection. He always made them believe it was in their own interest, when usually it was in Marty’s. And by letting them lead the way, they were the ones who encountered any snares and booby traps.
Who, then, was using me, and toward what end? And how dangerous were the booby traps? Those questions kept me awake for the next hour or so, while the name Hambledon fluttered above me like a moth until I finally drifted off.
After what felt like only minutes, the alarm shrieked. I shut it off and lay in the sudden silence. That’s when the moth landed on my forehead and whispered its name:
Tommy Hambledon.
He was a spymaster created by author Manning Coles, the pen name of a British mixed doubles writing team-Adelaide Frances Oke Manning and Cyril Henry Coles. The latter worked for British Intelligence, the former for the war office. They wrote dozens of Tommy Hambledon books. My dad had fifteen, but I owned only one- Drink to Yesterday, the first in the series, published way back in 1940.
I threw on a robe, descended the stairs in slippered feet, and retrieved the volume from the highest shelf. Dust puffed from the jacket as I turned to page 78.
At the bottom of the page, Tommy Hambledon told an excited new recruit exactly what entering the spy trade was about to do to his life:
“Yes, it’s got you now, and it will never let you go. When once the job has taken hold you’ll find that nothing else in life has any kick in it, and apart from the job you’re dead. Neither the fields of home nor the arts of peace nor the love of women will suffice.”
Under my present circumstances it sounded more like an enticement than a warning, and even as I began mapping my morning strategy for defending the fallen virtue of the Lattelicious Superluxe, in the back of my mind I already knew one thing for sure.
Used or not, I was going to Vienna.
4
You’ve probably guessed by now that I was an only child, and that my dad was a single parent. Two males, each playing solitaire, yet pleasantly companionable in our vagabond tour of Cold War Europe.
Only one memory of my mother survives, and even it remains in shadow. It is night, and I am two years old. We are living in Belgrade, forever my city of ill fortune. She stands backlit in my bedroom doorway, face in silhouette, features obscured. I am supposed to be asleep, so I shut my eyes as she steps forward in the dark to kiss me. Her lips are cool against my forehead. Her perfume is heady and Parisian, a scent phantom that has stalked me through life, growing fainter by the year.
She left us just before I turned three, then visited a few days later on the weekend of my birthday. Once the candles were blown out and I’d gone to bed, she and my father discussed how to divvy up custody. Then she went off to Greece, where a week later she died in a bus accident on some lonely hill in the Peloponnese. Probably while traveling with another man, I later surmised, although my father never said.
I like to believe that her absence made me a more careful observer. Children let their mothers do a lot of watching for them-keeping an eye out for cars, or for lurking strangers. My father hired nannies and sitters, of course, but I must have sensed that they never had quite the same stake in matters as a mom, so I developed a keener eye, a heightened awareness.
Her absence was at the heart of an ongoing conspiracy by which my father and I carefully avoided discussing delicate personal issues. Doing so would have risked having the subject of her desertion come up, so we spoke instead of the world around us-sports, school, current events. And books, always books. In Budapest, when I was nine or ten, the subject of American spies was in the news, so one night I asked my dad what it was, exactly, that spies did.
“Oh, things that we never see. With an import we can never be certain of. But rest assured, they make a difference, and they’re out there each and every day.”
