I’d texted my father to tell him I’d be late, but I hadn’t told him why. I felt guilty about that because I knew he was eager to find out what had happened at Kurzmann’s, and by the time I kissed Litzi goodnight it was nearly eleven. True to her word, she didn’t invite me upstairs, but we were meeting again tomorrow.
Dad and I had muddled through the balance of the previous evening with the help of food and lager. Figlmüller lived up to its end of the bargain by serving schnitzels the size of catcher’s mitts, but even that old comfort hadn’t eased things between us. I still had lots of questions, and I’m sure he had a few.
As I approached his apartment I saw that the lights were on. I was counting on the news of Litzi to serve as an icebreaker. He had always been fond of her, although I couldn’t help but remember his strange reaction the first time I’d mentioned her.
“What’s that name again, son?”
“Litzi Strauss.”
“Litzi. How unusual. Is she a Jew?”
“What? Does that matter?”
“Certainly not. It’s just that Kim Philby’s first wife was a Litzi from Vienna. Litzi Friedmann, a Jew. That’s why I asked. But your Litzi’s a Strauss. Doesn’t sound Jewish.”
“She’s not my Litzi.”
“Well, not yet, anyway.”
My blush told him all he needed to know about my ambitions on that front, and he nodded in approval.
“I’m happy for you, son. Love keeps us on our toes.”
“I never said I was in love.” Redder still.
Another knowing nod, then he said smugly, “No, I suppose you didn’t.”
Stung, I struck back below the belt.
“Being in love with Mom didn’t seem to keep you on your toes.”
The light went out in his eyes, and his subsequent surrender made me miserable.
“You’re right about that, son. Good luck with her all the same.”
He never asked about her in any meaningful way again. Small talk only where Litzi was concerned, and I was the poorer for it.
I found him waiting up for me in the living room with only Johnnie Walker Black for company. Judging by the level in the bottle, they’d gotten comfortable. I was tipsy from the wine, putting us on an equal footing.
“Long day?” he asked from his easy chair, a hint of concern in his tone. “Hope it wasn’t Christoph keeping you out so late, filling your head full of nonsense?”
“Christoph couldn’t get me out of Kurzmann’s fast enough. I ran into an old friend. Litzi Strauss.”
He brightened instantly.
“Wonderful! How is she?”
“Currently unmarried, looking well, and I’m seeing her again tomorrow. Those are the three things you really wanted to know, right?”
“I suppose so.” He smiled at my peace offering. “But tell me about Kurzmann’s. I’ve been wondering all day.”
“It was pretty strange. He hardly told me anything, except that he hadn’t taken a special order like that since the year we moved to Berlin. He did mention the whole routine you used to have. The Sunday phone calls at two on the dot. The plain brown wrappers tied in string.”
“Your delivery was wrapped that way?”
“Same price, too, except in euros. Or so he claimed.” Dad shook his head in amazement. “But he wouldn’t say what the transactions meant, or who they were for.”
“Probably because he didn’t know, and he never would’ve jeopardized the arrangement by asking. That price looked even higher back in the seventies. Christoph made a pretty penny off those little visits, but I suppose they were his fee as middleman.”
“Middleman for what? And what was your role?”
“I was a courier, plain and simple. It was my job to make the pickup, then drop off the item later in the day at another address, which was also relayed by phone, some voice telling me that my shirts were ready. There was a code. The name of the cleaner’s was always the street, and the stated price was the address.”
“Not very sophisticated.”
“Not if the line was bugged. But the embassy checked pretty regularly in those days.”
“Who was the ‘they’ in all this?”
“You can probably guess.”
“The Agency?”
“That was always my assumption.”
“Then tell me one thing. A truthful answer, straight up yes or no.”
“If I can.”
“Were you CIA?”
“No.”
He said it immediately and without wavering, his eyes looking straight into mine. His face and hands were calm, no gestures to betray either nerves or uncertainty. Then why did I still not believe him? He must have sensed my doubt, because he then opened up in a way he never had before.
“Look. When I say no, I mean absolutely, unequivocally no. But at various postings I was State’s liaison to the Agency. It’s unofficial. You’ll damn well never find it in Foreign Service job listings, but every embassy has one, and when you and I were living in Europe, I was usually the guy. So I did a few chores for them. It came with the job.”
“Like those meetings we used to go to, with those men who never gave their names?”
“What?”
“C’mon. You don’t remember dragging me to all those bars and cafés?”
He seemed annoyed.
“I met lots of old friend in cafés and bars. No doubt I sometimes took you along. But I wasn’t meeting spies for the Agency. Other than those few courier assignments, I never knowingly did anything for the Agency beyond a little consular paperwork—cleaning up a few passports, doling out visas for some of their émigrés, that sort of thing.”
Well, that was one youthful illusion shattered, provided he was telling the truth. Then he had a question for me.
“This package Christoph gave you—did you open it? Because that’s certainly something I never did.”
“Never?”
“Why risk finding out something that could get me in trouble? What if I’d been hauled in for questioning by some foreign government? I might’ve lost my job, or worse. Was I curious? Sure, but never tempted. And I believe I asked you a question.”
“Yes, I opened it. I took it down the street to a little Konditorei and sat in the back. It was nothing special. A German translation of London’s Own. Fourth printing of the paperback edition, unsigned.”
I withheld the part about “Dewey” and the enclosed message. If he offered more maybe I’d reciprocate.
“Right after I opened it I was accosted by this strange old troll who must have followed me from Kurzmann’s. His name was Lothar, and he sent you his regards.”
Dad surprised me by smiling broadly.
“The one and only? German fellow, looked like he might have just pulled an all-nighter with Mick and the Stones?”
“With a cane that he taps like a telegraph.”
“Complete affectation, but he’s entitled. Lothar Heinemann is a legend. Book scout extraordinaire.”
“Book scout?”
“How do you think I tracked down half my collection?” He waved an arm toward his shelves. “Some of the choicest finds were his. Ask Lothar to find a needle in a haystack and he’ll be back inside a week with five to choose from, plus a sewing box. He’s a genius. The problem is finding him. And, frankly, keeping him sober.”
“Booze?”
“Worse. Although I hear he’s been clean for years. Used to be very popular with Agency people. Ran off the rails for a while in the early seventies, but by then he was out of my price range. Too many other people wanted the same kind of stuff.”
“Agency people collect spy novels?”
“God, yes. At least half a dozen, to hear Lothar tell it, but I could never get him to spill any names. Lothar was always pretty cagey about who he was scouting for. But I do know one collector who never hired him. Edwin Lemaster.”
Dad gave me a smug look that suggested I should’ve known all along.
“That’s how we became friends, since you’ve always wanted to know. Talking about books. I was a little surprised he didn’t bring it up back in eighty-four.”
Finally.
“So where did you meet? And what year?”
“Oh, it must have been the late fifties. But I didn’t get to know him all that well until later, around sixty-seven. He’d just started writing Knee Knockers when we ran into each other at a bookstore in Budapest. He wasn’t comfortable telling the Agency about his little writing project, understandably, so I became a sounding board for his ideas—the plot, the characters. He loved the genre as much as I did, and wanted to be a part of it. I remember the day well. It was at Ferenc Szondi’s old store on Corvin Square.”
“Didn’t you send me there once to pick up a package? Wrapped in butcher paper, even?”
“I’m sure it was more than once.”
So I was right.
“Those were Agency errands?”
“Lord, no. Do you really think I’d have dispatched my ten-year-old on a mission for the CIA?”
A second illusion now lay in ruins, albeit one I’d concocted only that morning. Obviously my childhood hadn’t been as exciting as I thought, and I could only smile at my overactive imagination. It was the fault of those books on his shelves. Gazing up at them now, I easily recalled the way they’d once fired my youthful fantasies.
I knew the vital statistics of his collection by heart: 222 novels by 48 authors. Eighteen had worked for intelligence agencies, six more for a foreign ministry or a war office, so you knew the pages were spiked with disguised secrets.
By now you may have concluded it was mostly a Cold War library. While that aptly describes the ones I read as a teen, his holdings were far broader and deeper. More than a quarter of his first editions were published before 1950, and even The Riddle of the Sands, from 1903, wasn’t nearly the oldest.
There was Rudyard Kipling’s Kim from 1901, with its Great Game intrigues of British India, and William Le Queux’s Strange Tales of a Nihilist from 1892. The oldest was James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy from 1821, a tale of a double agent for George Washington. Dad’s two-volume copy was so fragile that he’d placed it off-limits, which made me curious enough at the age of fifteen to track down a reprint in an embassy library. I realized by the second sentence, which ran to a breathtaking eighty-five words, that I’d never finish. Yet it was Cooper’s first best seller, and he showed surprising prescience about the future of spying by having Washington tell the hero, “You must descend into the grave with the reputation of a foe to your native land. Remember that the veil which conceals your true character cannot be raised in years—perhaps never.”
You’ve probably never heard of most of the earliest authors, but some were hugely popular. Le Queux, for one, although to me he was a hack. Manning Coles, of the Tommy Hambledon books, took the quality up a notch, as did John Buchan, and then Ambler. And of course there was Joseph Conrad, who not only produced The Secret Agent in 1907, but a 1911 sequel, Under Western Eyes.
It was only in the mid-fifties that Cold War tales came into vogue, and even those were dominated for years by a pair of rakish Brits—Ian Fleming’s James Bond and Desmond Cory’s Johnny Fedora. Fedora is largely forgotten now, but he was in print two years before Bond. JFK made all the difference for Fleming when the dashing young president revealed he was a Bond fan. Sales took off, and Hollywood took notice. Fleming also had the better pedigree, having worked in British intelligence with everyone from Kim Philby to Graham Greene.
Dad harrumphed that Fedora and Bond were “cartoons for the drunk and oversexed,” yet he collected all sixteen Fedoras, and all fourteen Bonds with their beautiful jacket illustrations by Richard Chopping. He also grabbed up the first five books in Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm series—another man of action, and far worthier than the spoofy film portrayal by Dean Martin—and all four books in Adam Diment’s series featuring Philip McAlpine, a groovy Austin Powers prototype.
The more cerebral spies whom we now think of as the genre’s exemplars didn’t start showing up until ’61, with le Carré’s Smiley, and at first even he was more concerned with solving murders than digging out moles. Then, in ’62, Len Deighton gave us something darker and more genuine to chew on with The Ipcress File, with its anonymous hero (a spy who didn’t acquire the Harry Palmer name until the books went to Hollywood). The following year le Carré published The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, which made even Graham Greene gush, and afterward things were never the same.
Lemaster’s arrival at the end of the sixties led an American charge joined by Charles McCarry, Robert Littell, and even the political pundit William F. Buckley Jr. (I refused to read his Blackford Oakes spy novels after coming across two pedantic groaners in the first three paragraphs: “Johnny got orotund when he was tight” and “At Yale, mere registrars don’t summon students thus peremptorily.”)
The early seventies ushered in a golden age of Lemaster and le Carré, plus Deighton and Adam Hall with his knotty string of Quiller novels. By the eighties, even some of the genre’s older hands had returned—Graham Greene, Ted Allbeury, Helen MacInnes, and E. Howard Hunt, the ex-CIA man notorious for his role in the Watergate scandal. Dad has seven Hunt novels dating back to 1942, and they’re not bad. Richard Helms used to give copies to friends back when he ran the Agency.
At the height of the Cold War, publishers were churning out so many spy novels that it was hard for collectors to keep pace. There was a spin-off from a comic strip (Modesty Blaise, by Peter O’Donnell), a quasi-spoof by an established literary author (Tremor of Intent, by Anthony Burgess, of A Clockwork Orange fame), and even a few Russian titles with KGB heroes by the Soviet writer Yulian Semyonov. Finally, William Hood, the aforementioned Angleton deputy, joined the fray with the novel that Litzi and I had just seen a page of, Spy Wednesday. His second novel, Cry Spy, published a few months after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, was the last non-Lemaster title my dad collected. The following year I gave him a signed copy of le Carré’s The Secret Pilgrim, but he handed it right back and told me he was off the stuff for good. Soon afterward I did the same.
“Bill?” My dad called out through the haze. “Are you drifting away from me?”
“Sorry. Must be the wine. And the jet lag, of course.” But now I had a question for him. “Why did Lemaster never use Lothar?”
“For him half the fun was hunting down the titles. Of course that only piqued Lothar’s curiosity. Whenever I’d bump into him in some far-flung bookstall he’d always ask if I knew what Ed was up to.”
I noted the use of Lemaster’s nickname, the first time Dad had showed such familiarity.
“How well did you know Lemaster?”
“Mostly as a fellow book hound. And not as well as I thought, apparently.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s the kind of person you warm up to right away. Witty, engaging. Seems to open up in a hurry. Makes you feel like part of his inner circle. But after a while, you realize that’s as close as you’re going to get. Sort of like those old book clubs that used to lure you in with those great offers—any four for a dollar!—then, boom, no more freebies. Full price only.”
“Was it for professional reasons?”
“Not completely. But I’ve never known for sure. He was an enigma that way, and I’ve never heard differently from anyone else.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“He was doing secret work, son. His movements, his whereabouts, his contacts. All that, even the little things, had to be kept under wraps, even after he’d quit. He made that very clear to me.”
“But you knew. Why do you think he trusted you? You weren’t even in the Agency. Whatever happened to ‘Trust No One’?”
“Life. Life is what always happens to ‘Trust No One.’ ”
A curious comment, and there was probably more behind it than Dad wanted to tell me. I could live with that. He had already been far more generous than I’d expected.
Now it was my turn to give. Not everything, of course. If he could hold some items in reserve, so could I, especially since what I had to say wasn’t going to be easy for either of us. I poured a shot of Johnnie Walker, swallowed, and waited for the little explosion of heat to reach the bottom of my throat.
Then I delivered the news.