The Double Game (37 page)

The address was a house, a crumbling three-story Hapsburg fortress built of stone, with grand dormers, a spired turret, and a pitched slate roof. I rang the bell, but there was no sound in response, so I knocked loudly, then began counting the seconds beneath my breath. At eleven I heard footfalls on the stairs. The only other sound was the hum of a streetlamp.

Someone was coming, a heavy but uncertain tread, like a man leery of falling. Old, I guessed. A key rattled and clicked. The door opened just enough for an eye to peer out at me from a face full of folds and wrinkles. The door swung free.

With Belgrade as a point of reference, I recognized him right away, even after nineteen years. He looked as grumpy and disagreeable as ever.

“Cage,” he croaked. “Inconvenient as always.”

“The message said anytime.” My voice misted in the autumn chill. “I decided to take you at your word.”

“
I
didn’t write that.”

He glanced up and down the street, then motioned me inside.

“You’d better be alone.”

“As far as I know.”

He wore a white silk robe and felt slippers. He didn’t offer a hand in greeting, which was just as well because I wouldn’t have taken it.

“You do know who I am?” he asked.

“Of course. Milan Bobik.”

Bobik had been the press spokesman for the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry. He was the official who, after days of testy wrangling, had finally marched me into a conference room and explained that my visa request had been denied. The decision, he emphasized, was final and irrevocable, and no manner of appeal or pleading would ever make it otherwise. To my mind, Bobik embodied the beginning of my end.

The
Post
protested the decision, but recalled me from the field and sent a more acceptable candidate. The following week I sat down with my wife, April, to say that, until I had a chance to regroup professionally, perhaps we’d better postpone our plans for starting a family. At least by one year, preferably two. That’s when she told me she was pregnant with David. He was the greatest gift of my life, and at the time I treated him as a millstone, an ambush. As I said before: Beware the thwarted man, particularly if he is in his mid-thirties and is already gazing off with trepidation toward the bitter end. I acted like an immature ass, spoiled and undeserving, and now here I was back at the source, although I suppose I’d known for all of these nineteen years that the real source of the problem was me.

Bobik sat me down in his kitchen, which smelled of onions and old plumbing. He flipped on a ceiling light, squinted, then retrieved a bottle and two glasses from a cabinet and set them on the table.

Slivovitz, of course, the Balkan plum brandy that had lubricated more than a dozen years of war and revolution, and entire centuries of aggrievement.

“Drink first, you will need it.” He didn’t forget to help himself.

“What are you doing in Budapest?” I asked.

“When Miloševik fell, Belgrade was not the right place for people like me. So here I am. All those cowards who came here during the war to dodge conscription are now back in Belgrade, pretending to be true Serbs. I should have waved to them as we passed at the border.”

“What do you do now?”

“It is too late for a chat. Drink.”

I polished off the brandy in two swallows, a cheap store-bought brand that was as about as smooth as sulfuric acid. He poured another shot.

“You will need them both.” A grim nod of certainty, but I shook my head and pushed away the glass. He shrugged, drained it himself, then stood and went to a desk in the hall, where he slid open a drawer. He walked back to the table holding a folded paper in his right hand.

“I understand, Cage, that you and your father are both collectors. I am as well, especially of items that are likely to appreciate in value.”

He handed me the paper, then remained standing as I unfolded it and began to read. It was a letter, dated March 11, 1992, on the official stationery of Wallace Vandewater, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, U.S. Department of State.

The letter was only two paragraphs, four sentences in all. Mr. Vandewater certainly got straight to the point:

Dear Mr. Bobik,

We respectfully request for reasons of national security that the application for a residence visa filed with your country by
Washington Post
correspondent William D. Cage be respectfully but firmly denied. By necessity, our rationale for this request must remain confidential. On the same grounds, we further request that the reason for your denial not be revealed to Mr. Cage.

I trust this will be our only correspondence on this matter.

Respectfully yours,

Wallace Vandewater

He signed it with a flourish, like a literary autograph dashed off in a great hurry so that other fans wouldn’t be kept waiting. I’d never met Mr. Vandewater, but I did know his top deputy at the time, Warfield Cage. My father went to work for Vandewater in 1991, after the State Department finally called him in from the field following thirty-six years of diplomatic service. He remained at the job until 1998, when he retired to his favorite city, Vienna, the birthplace of his son.

At first, I wasn’t sure what to feel. Shock, of course. Dismay and grief, naturally. Collectively they hit me hard enough to stir up the first wallowing surge of nausea, which I fought down by drawing a deep breath. My chest felt tight for a second or two, but I was certain that anger would soon make me capable of breathing fire, even though at the moment a huge boulder of bewilderment was blocking its path.

I reread the letter, looking closely, even desperately, for any sign that a mistake had been made, or that Vandewater’s intent had been misconstrued. Missing that, I hoped to discover signs of a forgery, a ruse.

But as a diplomat’s son I’d seen these kinds of letters many times before, on this very grade of official stationery. And as badly as I wanted to find something amiss, everything was in order. The only item that might be in doubt was whether Vandewater himself had written it, because I knew from Dad that these sorts of chores were often handled directly by deputies, who added their bosses’ signatures with an autopen.

Is that what my father had done? Was he in fact not just a willing participant but the instigator? And why?
National security?
The idea was preposterous. I was a journalist then, period. Ambitious and curious, yes, but only a scribbler. I didn’t keep secrets, I exposed them. Why had I been the object of this outrage?

I needed another drink, but when Bobik anticipated me by pouring a glass, I refused to give him the satisfaction.

“There is more,” he said. “As I told you, I am a collector.”

He handed me an old report of some kind, but it was typed in Cyrillic characters—either Russian or Serbian—and I couldn’t read a word of it.

“Is this in Serbo-Croatian?”

“Serbian. It is from an ambitious young employee in our Foreign Ministry in 1959, Ivo Markovik. His job was to coordinate electronic and visual surveillance of Western embassies. Would you like a translation?”

“Probably not, but go ahead.”

1959. The year of the polygraph that Valerie Humphries told me about. The year that Dad and Ed Lemaster must have first crossed paths, and probably Breece Preston as well. The year my mom left us, then died on a high road in Greece.

“Apparently your father became involved in some sort of dispute. ‘A flap,’ I believe they called it.”

“Flap” had always been CIA slang for a screw-up.

“Over what?”

“It is vague. Markovik could not recover every detail. But it was serious enough that a polygraph machine was used, and its results were debated, then suppressed. The other figure in this drama was a young embassy functionary whom we had already identified as an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency. He is known now as a great author.”

“Edwin Lemaster.”

Bobik nodded.

“Markovik determined that some sort of indiscretion had occurred.”

“Indiscretion?”

“A security lapse. Potentially a serious one. Apparently there was great worry in your embassy of public embarrassment, even scandal, but Markovik concluded that your father was able to keep it under wraps.”

Just as I thought.

“So this was something Lemaster had done?”

“The evidence was not clear on that point. All that Markovik knew for certain was that one of their careers was briefly in the balance, then saved. A salvage job. I believe that was the term he used.”

Meaning Dad had either covered for him, or had coached him on how to beat the machine on a second try.

“What else?”

“Well, don’t you see the link?”

“The link?”

“To what happened in ’92. Ivo Markovik—do you not recognize the name?”

Now I did, even though I’d done my best to erase every memory of my brief time in Belgrade.

“He was at the Foreign Ministry,” I said. “One of the Miloševik people.”

“A top deputy. Had you been installed as a full-time correspondent, you would no doubt have sought to interview him. And when your name came up for a visa, he was the one who remembered this affair from the 1950s. Being a collector himself, he quickly produced a copy of this old report. Your father, no doubt, became aware of its existence.”

“So he had me blackballed?” I was incredulous. “Some minor embassy cover-up for a CIA man led him to engineer
this?
”

“You must understand. The Western media were completely against us. We were using all leverage at our disposal to change that. If you had worked in Belgrade, I am sure that this would have been used to try to influence you. Your father’s past would have been exposed. And with it, Mr. Lemaster’s.”

I didn’t buy it. Or at least not until I considered a further possibility:

What if, by covering for Lemaster, my father had enabled a budding double agent to flourish and grow? And what if, by 1992, even Dad suspected as much? Darker still, what if he’d then become part of Lemaster’s campaign of deception, which would have made him even more vulnerable to the release of those old secrets from 1959?

A real Joe.
That was how Lemaster had described Dad on the day of our interview. “Joe” was British espionage slang for “agent,” as I knew from my reading. A few days ago Dad had sworn point-blank that he’d never worked for the CIA, and I’d believed him. Maybe I should have asked instead if he’d ever worked for the KGB.

“You see it, do you not?” Bobik said it with a note of triumph. “I can tell by your eyes. It is true. He worked against your interests in order to protect his own.”

That was indeed the nut of it, a painful truth that landed like a knife at the bottom of my gut. And what of my mother, who had left us that very year? Had Dad’s duplicity driven her away? She might even have discovered details that Markovik hadn’t known, so she’d run off to Greece to be killed in an accident. Assuming it was an accident. Because Breece Preston was possibly in the mix as well, in some way, shape, or form. What did I truly know about any of those events, other than my father’s version?

A chain reaction of doubt and worry built toward critical mass, fueled by slivovitz. I stood shakily from Bobik’s table. His air of satisfaction sickened me. I wanted out of there. Now.

“You must think about these things, then act upon them,” he said smugly as he followed me to the door.

As I reached the silence of the streets I thought I heard him laughing. Like Szondi, I thought. Like all of Budapest, it seemed.

33

Walking back to the inn it occurred to me that, like it or not, my handler had achieved the desired result. I was now determined to see this through, no matter how dangerous. If vengeance was his goal, then he had chosen the perfect vessel for delivery.

The quest had begun for me as a means of renewal, perhaps even redemption. It had turned into something far uglier—a means of retribution—and I felt powerless to stop it. It was still dark when I returned, but Litzi was awake and dressed, and fretful with worry.

“Where
were
you? I thought they must have taken you.”

“I was finding out the truth about my father.”

That caught her short.

“It doesn’t seem to have made you happy.”

So I showed her the documents and told her the two Belgrade stories, beginning with my downfall in the early nineties, then working my way back toward the so-called “flap” involving the cover-up of a failed polygraph.

To my annoyance, Litzi was not particularly sympathetic. She listened with an air of growing impatience, and by the end she was rolling her eyes. Just as I was finishing, she could no longer contain herself.

“No, no,
no!
You see it, but you don’t see it. Or maybe you’ve known all along but
refuse
to see it. Or maybe I just think that because I know more than you.”

“What do you mean?”

She shook her head.

“I shouldn’t be the one to tell you. This is between you and your father.”

“I’ll manage that all right, the moment we’re back. With everything I’ve learned he’ll
have
to come clean. At least now I know why he didn’t want me to pursue this.”

“You have it backwards. Yes, he was behind the letter. That’s clear enough. But the only person he was really betraying was himself. Don’t you see?”

“No. I don’t.” She watched me closely, as if deciding whether my bewilderment was genuine. Then she took my hand, more in the manner of mother to child than woman to lover, and she spoke very gently.

“That time that I spied on him, when we were seventeen. Remember that I told you I went into his bedroom, but didn’t find anything worth reporting?”

“Yes.”

Her tone was grave.

“Well, I did find something. I never reported it, because it had nothing to do with his work. But I am almost sure your father knew I’d seen it.”