Dad was less than thrilled with my treatment at the hands of our government. The polygraph angered him even more than the abduction, the injection, or the way they lashed me to a chair. But I think he was secretly envious that they’d assigned me to close the case.
“They’ll probably give it a name,” he said. “You’ll end up in their archives, with your own operation.”
“Doubtful. It’s unofficial. Less than unofficial, if you get right down to it.”
“Doesn’t matter. Those people can’t take a dump without assigning a code name. They can’t help themselves.”
We were seated with Litzi around his dinner table. It was noon. After getting in the night before at nearly one a.m., the long hours had finally caught up with me, and I’d slept until eleven, troubled throughout by bizarre dreams. We were now working our way through a pot of coffee, chocolate croissants, and the last of the cold cuts.
“I never would’ve believed Giles Cabot was capable of engineering all this,” Dad said. “Ten years ago maybe. I’d always heard he was a vindictive son of a bitch. But the way he looked at the funeral I wouldn’t have given him another month. I don’t know whether to tell you to be careful for your own sake or for his.”
“I do seem to remember a pretty capable fellow pushing his wheelchair.”
“Kyle Anderson. Someone said he was a former Agency knuckle-dragger. Dirty deeds galore in Latin America. He’s been Cabot’s personal assistant for years. Probably who typed those messages on your Royal. Probably also the guy sending those K-Fresh emails to your fake Russian in Prague. The best part now is, you get to find out for yourself.”
Litzi, having experienced firsthand how such assignments could go wrong even with the best of intentions, was more circumspect.
“Do the bare minimum, then get out,” she said. “Even that will probably be too much.”
“At the very least maybe I’ll get my books back.”
“Of all the things he did, that was the strangest,” Dad said. “What was the point?”
“Lothar said Cabot always believed there was something about the books themselves that made them valuable to the courier system. Not that he ever found out what it was. Maybe Cabot thought that as a courier I might have ended up with one of the books. So he stole them to check for himself.”
“Typical Agency overkill.”
“Even after how he’s used me, I’m not looking forward to breaking an old man’s heart. I hope there’s a way to do this gently.”
“There never is,” Litzi said. “You’d be better off spending the weekend with your son.”
Someone from the Agency was supposed to drop off a parcel in the afternoon, containing whatever bait they’d rigged for Cabot. I was then supposed to place it at the dead drop the next morning, on my way to catch a 9:40 flight to Boston. It connected through Paris and was scheduled to arrive at 2:05 p.m. I had a car reservation on the six o’clock ferry from Port Judith, which would put me on Block Island by seven. Then I was on my own.
In the afternoon Litzi and I went shopping for supplies. I noticed Agency men fore and aft. They were constantly chatting into cell phones, and they didn’t seem to mind if anyone saw them. Maybe that was the point.
I’d decided that the best approach to snooping around Cabot’s farm would be to pose as a bird-watcher, so I bought a hat, a rucksack, outdoor clothes, and a pricey pair of binoculars. I would pick up a guidebook and maps on the island. Bicycling was a popular way for getting around there, so I planned to rent a mountain bike suitable for trails and open fields.
The Agency had given me a diagram showing the lay of the land around Cabot’s ten-acre property, plus a photo of his gray clapboard farmhouse, which sat on a grassy rise with an eastward view of the Atlantic. On the diagram someone had not so subtly marked an X on a small nature preserve that abutted his land. Presumably it offered the best vantage point.
Litzi and I ate an early dinner, but kept our wine consumption to a minimum. We said good-bye afterward, parting with plans for her to visit Georgetown later that fall. A real vacation this time, with no more secrets between us. I was already wondering what David would make of her.
When I got back to the apartment, Dad was in one of his most familiar poses, seated in the easy chair across from his great wall of books. He was flipping through the old courier copy of Oppenheim’s The Great Impersonation that I’d brought back from Szondi in Budapest.
“You should turn in early,” he said, which was what he’d always told me the night before a big race.
“I will. Although the jet lag’s never half as bad on the way back.”
He nodded toward a sealed, unmarked envelope on an end table.
“They dropped that by around four.”
Neither of us was curious enough to open it, probably because we knew it was fake. If Cabot also figured that out, my assignment would become that much tougher.
“I’d forgotten how silly Oppenheim’s dialogue comes across these days,” Dad said. “It’s like Gilbert and Sullivan without the music.” He shut the book. “So you said Lothar’s a pretty good writer?”
“Especially for a first-timer.”
“Who would you compare him to?”
“Hard to say, since his book’s in German. Adam Hall, maybe?”
Dad was impressed.
“I always liked Hall’s Quiller novels. One of the few nonspooks who got the details right. He’s buried in Washington, you know?”
“Adam Hall? I thought he was a Brit?”
“He was. Elleston Trevor was his legal name, although he was born as Trevor Dudley-Smith. He’s in a little Catholic cemetery, probably only a mile or two from your house.”
“How the hell did you know that?”
“I know all sorts of useless trivia about these damn things, and for the past twenty years it’s been going to waste. It’s time I put it to use again, so I’ve come up with a new project-finding the new whereabouts of Lothar’s lost book. Might as well revisit a few of my old haunts, don’t you think?”
“Think Lothar will pick up your trail?”
“Oh, I know he will. I’m betting he’ll be flattered.”
“He’ll be rooting for you. I think he liked the idea of finally having a reader.”
Dad reopened the Oppenheim.
“It has to be better than this old stuff and nonsense.” He shook his head as he gazed at the cover. “And say what you want about that bastard Szondi, at least he knows how to treat a rare book.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, look how he’s marked the price. This little sticker on the protective jacket. I’ve never understood why so many booksellers routinely take the best items in their store and scribble the amount in pencil on the flyleaf. It’s a small thing, but why deface their very own holdings? I’ve never understood it, and… Well, I’ll be damned.”
“What?”
“He wrote the price inside, too. Damn fool.”
“Let me see that.”
Dad handed over the book. I again considered Cabot’s theory that the books themselves were somehow important, apart from any code. On the inside of the plastic protective cover there was another small sticker, aligned perfectly with the one on the outside. They were back to back.
“Do you have a razor handy?”
“Medicine cabinet. You’re not going to slice up the Oppenheim, are you? Even bad prose doesn’t deserve that.”
“I want to peel back this sticker, the one on the inside.”
The look on his face told me he’d figured out what I was up to. He headed briskly down the hall and returned with a bare blade.
“Careful, it’s double-edged.”
He stood over me as I peeled up a tiny flap of the red circle. The middle of it, I realized now, had no adhesive. Only the edges were sticky. And there, just beneath the center, was a tiny disc of film, which for nearly forty years had remained there, well hidden from prying eyes.
