Read Online The Double Game by Dan Fesperman - Free Book Online Page B

anticlimactic. It was a German softbound edition of Lemaster’s London’s Own, a special book in that it was the volume in which the beleaguered Folly, seemingly past his prime, had finally turned the tables on his Soviet nemesis, Strelnikov. But there was nothing special about this edition, a dog-eared paperback from a fifth printing of a translation. I was about to open it when a man’s raspy voice made me jump half out of my skin.
    “Fifty? For that ?”
    It was the harvester from Kurzmann’s, pulling up a chair as if we were old friends.
    “Personally, I wouldn’t give you a fiver for it. Two if you were lucky.” His right hand darted across the table and snatched the book away. He tutted as he turned to the title page. “No. Not even signed.” To my relief, he handed it back.
    His fingernails, which I would have expected to be chewed or dirty, were clean and manicured, and his hands looked soft. His face was unshaven, but he smelled freshly showered, and his eyes were a clear, sober blue, if a bit careworn. He spoke German with a lowbrow Berlin accent. The general impression he made was of someone who’d begun cleaning up his act but hadn’t quite finished. He carried an elegant cane of varnished oak topped by a wolf’s head of carved ivory, which he propped against the table.
    “Who are you?” I asked.
    “I’m glad you spoke up so clearly back there at Christoph’s. I’m not sure I’d have recognized you otherwise.”
    “You know me?”
    “From many years and many places.” He rose nimbly to his feet. Books bulged from both pockets of his overcoat. “I trust that your father is well. A wonderful man. And in case you’re wondering, I’m not the only one who followed you here, although I’d have thought you’d at least notice the other one. She’s far more attractive.”
    I looked around quickly, half expecting to see the slender young woman from Georgetown. The only other customer was an old man nibbling strudel at a far table.
    “Oh, she’s long gone. Took off the second you untied the knot. For now I’d say you’re quite safe.” Then he crouched at my side and whispered in my ear. “Of course, that’s subject to change if you keep announcing yourself as ‘Dewey’ everywhere you go.”
    He stood and checked his watch. “I should be going. Work to do.” He headed for the exit, thumping the cane against the floor with every step.
    “Who are you?” I asked again.
    He turned to face me as he opened the door.
    “Tell your father that Lothar sends his regards. Farewell.”
    Then, with a tip of his hat and a flap of his coattails, Lothar was gone, although for a few seconds more I heard his cane, tapping as urgently as an SOS.
    Now, who the hell was Lothar? A bit player for hire, or a chance interloper? A goad or a threat? And who was following me? Or was that something Lothar had made up to rattle me, another part of his act?
    I returned my attention to the paperback and noticed a bookmark peeping from midway through the text. It had a logo at the top from an antiquarian bookstore in Prague, with an address right around the corner from the apartment where my dad and I had lived when I was fourteen. The store’s name, Antikvariat Drebitko, immediately triggered a memory that, in the context of this morning’s events, was mildly disturbing. My father had twice sent me there to pick up exactly this kind of parcel—a book wrapped in butcher paper, tied with string. That memory, in turn, unlocked another: I had carried out similar errands in Budapest when I must have been only ten or eleven.
    Had my father employed me as some sort of clandestine courier? At one level it was exciting, but now I could also see it from a father’s point of view, and I was appalled. Anything might have happened to me.
    I opened the book to the marked page. At the top was a single handwritten word in block letters, next to a time:
“BRAUNERHOF. 10:30.”
    Below, a passage of the novel was marked off:
Folly