“Where?”
“All around us.” He chuckled and shook the ice in his cocktail-a gin and tonic, so it must have been summer. “Like God.”
It was a surprising answer, considering he’d never once taken me to church, so I asked the logical follow- up.
“Do you believe in God?”
“Absolutely. Life didn’t just spring up out of thin air.”
“What do you think he’s like?”
“Oh, I doubt it’s a he or she, don’t you? I’ve never understood why everyone has to turn God into such a human, and not a very nice one at that. A petty know-it-all who demands to be worshipped, and will damn you to Hell if you don’t.”
Henceforth, the subjects of spies and God were intertwined in my mind. Both came to represent the unknown and the unknowable, which is probably why I was predisposed to like those novels of Dad’s. They were textual glances into the firmament.
Now, here I was about to join the priesthood, so to speak, by heading back to Vienna where all those first editions still lined his shelves-signed, dated, and dusted once a week. As a boy I’d occasionally spotted what I thought were glimmers of real characters hiding in their thickets of prose, especially Lemaster’s.
“Dad,” I would ask, “is this Mr. So-and-So from the embassy he’s writing about?”
“No, son, it’s a novel. All the characters are made up.”
“But-”
“They’re not real people, Bill.”
And that would close the subject until I spotted the next one, peeping from the pages like a fugitive. Now, based on the messages I’d received, it didn’t seem far-fetched to believe that every answer I sought might be found within those books.
But first things first. The secular business of Ealing Wharton awaited. I also needed a plausible excuse to go snooping around in my old backyard of Europe. Cover, in other words. Building a legend, as Folly would have put it. To do the work of a spy, I would have to start behaving like one, especially if someone was already tracking me.
God and spying. Father and son. A mole’s two masters. Tandems were much on my mind after my night of eerie visitations. Let the Double Game proceed.
5
My first independent act of espionage in Operation Lemaster, as it would later come to be known in official channels, was to lie to my boss. Easy. Having spent the morning dissembling under oath on behalf of a milk frother, fibbing to Marty Ealing for my own benefit felt as righteous as a donation to Amnesty International.
“Hate to drop this on you now, Marty, but I need a few weeks off. It’s personal.”
“Personal?”
We were in Marty’s office, and I knew I’d said the magic word. To Marty, “personal” is where everything juicy goes to hide, the stuff of leverage and control.
“It’s my dad.”
Marty frowned. Clearly he’d hoped for something messier, preferably a woman married to someone other than me. I have zero respect for Marty, which is one reason I still run. It takes at least four hard miles along the C amp;O towpath to sweat out a day’s labors at Ealing Wharton.
“He’s seventy-eight and lives alone in Vienna.” Sensing I was losing my audience, I picked up the pace. “I’m all he’s got, and, well, you know how it goes at that age.”
“Say no more, Bill. Hell, after the way you wrapped that committee around your middle finger this morning”- Marty always telegraphs his punch lines-”how could I say no? We’ll work out any adjustment to your compensation later.”
My second act was to phone Arch Bascombe, an old colleague from the Post who was now an editor at Vanity Fair. Might he be interested, I asked, in a freelance piece on the espionage career of author Edwin Lemaster?
“Isn’t he the one you burned in that interview piece way back when?”
“At least you remember.”
“So you finally got to the bottom of that?”
“Getting there. Headed to Vienna tomorrow, in fact.”
“I’ll bite. On spec, of course. And I can’t cover expenses.”
“Understood. But a letter of introduction would help. You’d be surprised how much weight that still carries in the Old World.”
Bascombe was charmed by the idea, and the price was right. He emailed me an official-looking letter on magazine letterhead. My cover was set.
I then telephoned the one person in Washington whose opinion still mattered to me. My son, David.
Like a politician who pays too much attention to approval ratings, I’d been making something of a comeback with David during the past year, and nothing had pleased me more. While it would be nice to think my own efforts were responsible-I’d taken him on some college visits during his senior year of high school, and in the spring I’d attended all his lacrosse games-the real reason was his own maturation. Not only had he become an engaging and interesting young man, he had learned not to hold a grudge.
He was a freshman at Georgetown, right across the neighborhood, and we had dinner once a week. Now that he no longer lived at home, I was at last on equal footing with his mother for shared time. I wanted to let him know I’d be going abroad.
Fortunately he was free for the evening. He picked Martin’s Tavern, a hangout at Wisconsin and N within walking distance for both of us. As always, I arrived ten minutes early. Once you’ve deserted a child, you never again want him to enter a room where you’re supposed to be waiting and find it empty.
Martin’s is one of those places with English hunting prints on the wall and a brass rail at the bar. I ordered a pint of ale and settled into a booth. David arrived on schedule. Salazar, a waiter familiar with all the regulars, directed him to our table.
I stood to give him a hug, a greeting he’d recently begun reciprocating.
“You look good, David.” He was flushed from a workout. He’d be playing college lacrosse in the spring, but they already had him running and lifting weights. I loved watching him play because his motor never quit. It made me believe that somewhere inside him beat the heart of a distance runner, although I knew better than to say so.
“You look good, too, Dad. What’d you do, quit your job?”
He was perceptive in that way, like his grandfather.
“Next best thing. I’m taking some time off. Going to Vienna to see your granddad. After that, who knows? But I’ll be gone a few weeks.”
Salazar took our standard order-the Delmonico for David, lamb chops for me.
“How are your classes going?”
“Not as hard as I thought they’d be.”
“That comes later, when they know you’ve let your guard down.”
Sensing the onset of a fatherly lecture, he nimbly changed the subject.
“So how come you never told me about the history of this place?” He beamed as he said it, in the manner of all college freshmen bursting with new knowledge.
“Martin’s has a history? I know Washington never slept here.”
“Spies. It was a KGB hangout in the seventies. Some big-shot controller used to meet his boss here. Before that there was Elizabeth Bentley, the Red Spy Queen. She’d come here for drinks during the war, then meet her contact at a pharmacy down the street. Then there was the Russian defector, Oleg Kalugin, who ran out on his CIA contact from a restaurant right across the street, where the Five Guys is now. And about six blocks from here is
