The Double Game by Dan Fesperman Read Free Book Online

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 where crazy Jim Angleton used to have his three-martini lunches, sometimes with Kim Philby. They were buddies, you know.”
    “Whoa, now.” I took a big swallow of ale to hide my unease. The one topic I didn’t want to raise, and he’d raised it. “Where’d you learn all that?” Not from a sealed envelope slipped beneath his door, I hoped.
    “I’m taking an intro to European history since World War II. For the Cold War he had us read The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. Awesome book. It made me want to look up all the spy stuff that happened around here. I kept thinking of all those novels of yours, so I’ve been checking out some of them from the library.”
    Like father, like son, like grandson.
    “Don’t bother with the library. Just ask. Or come and take them, you’ve got a key.”
    It then hit me with devastating suddenness that David would have made the perfect accomplice for whoever was orchestrating my adventures, and for a millisecond I was perched on the edge of hurt and disappointment, thinking he would now reveal all with a belly laugh at my expense. A spy book caper, cooked up to spoof me. Just as quickly the moment passed. There were too many details he wouldn’t have known, and he certainly didn’t have the means to have broken into the house at the dead drop. And this was David, not some client at Ealing Wharton.
    “Holy shit,” he said quietly. He was looking over my shoulder.
    “What is