Code Name: Columbo

After being retired for several years, I was surprised to receive the call from “the Company.” They wanted to send me on one more mission. With Putin’s war on Ukraine dragging on, and a new Cold War emerging from this conflict, the US government had decided to call upon some of its most dependable former operatives to take up the torch of freedom once again. (Most people are unaware of the crucial role that Kathleen and I had played behind the Iron Curtain before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991). Under the guise of a vacation to Eastern Europe, we were ordered to find and make contact with certain Russian operatives who would then work with our government to overthrow Putin, or otherwise put an end to his violent and authoritarian regime. While we were reluctant to bring our daughter into the family “business,” they also persuaded us to recruit Kristin into the operation as our technological expert in this top-secret mission. It was only yesterday, after the mission was completed, that we received permission to reveal the nature of this and earlier operations to the public. At long last, the truth can be told.

To avoid suspicion, Kristin flew separately from us. She even persuaded her husband, Kevin, to undergo bypass heart surgery several months ago to provide a plausible explanation for his absence on this family vacation. Kathleen and I flew from Minneapolis to Chicago, then overnight to Frankfurt, Germany, and finally to the twin cities of Buda and Pest, in Hungary.

After checking into the Intercontinental Hotel in downtown Pest, we linked up with Kristin in an out of the way bistro. At a dark, corner table, over appetizers and wine, we opened our dossiers and discovered our code names and the details of our operation. Kristin was given the name “Trebek” because of her Jeopardy experience, while they dusted off Kathleen’s old name of “Pavlova,” given due to her background as a prima ballerina. Over the years, she had carefully disguised her talent as a dancer by pretending to be a person with limited rhythm, balance, and agility. She cultivated this persona so successfully that even long-time friends were unaware of her terpsichorean skills. I received the new name of “Columbo,” and my orders were to operate much like the old TV detective of the same name. Thus, we were to emulate the character played by Hungarian actor Peter Falk, bumbling about, pretending to be clueless American tourists, while doggedly pursuing our duel objectives. We were to establish contact with a Russian operative who would work with us from within the Kremlin, or, failing that, we were to allow ourselves to be contacted by a spy with similar goals. Sliding easily into our “spook” roles, we even ordered a second bottle of wine that night and feigned having a great time talking and catching up.

Budapest, in a formerly communist country that is once again under the thumb of an autocratic, Trump-like leader, is nonetheless a beautiful city that brought back many memories of battling the KGB during the Cold War. For three days, we stumbled around and took many wrong turns as if we were typical tourists without a clue of where we were going. Trebek, however, had done her homework ahead of time and guided us expertly over serpentine routes through neighborhoods that were established in the 1800s. She also taught us the conversion rates of the Hungarian Forint (they don’t use the Euro) and the way to use the public transportation system. We left no stone unturned as we searched for spies or other Russians we might be able to turn. We looked in the Hieronymous Bosch exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts. We found no spies, but I woke up screaming in the night, with images from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights dancing in my nightmares. We went so far as to take in the famous public baths, willingly displaying our septuagenarian and forty-something bodies in bathing suits next to fit twenty-year-olds in our relentless pursuit of that elusive contact. In one particular pool of warm, ninety-degree, mineral water, I slid over next to a man who I thought was Russian. He got the wrong idea, however, and, with a heavy Hungarian accent, politely, but forcefully asked me to get away from him.

At one point, we were afraid we had blown our cover while exploring Liberty Square with its monuments to those who had fought for Hungary’s freedom over the years. At a unique fountain at the end of the park, Trebek walked directly into a ring of water shooting up from the ground. Just as she stepped into the fountain, however, the water where she stepped miraculously stopped flowing and she walked into the center of the shooting water still completely dry. She had learned of this fascinating fountain from her research on the city. At that moment, however, a guard at the nearby US Embassy eyed her activity with a suspicious eye. I froze with indecision, but Pavlova shrewdly seized the initiative by adopting the role of a bumbling tourist. She copied Trebek’s actions and walked directly into the spraying water, but in an area that did not contain the sensors that stopped the water from shooting up. She stood there, dripping water from head to toe, while Trebek and I pretended to laugh uproariously. The guard turned away without a word, and our cover was preserved.

While in Budapest, Trebek also struck a blow for American foreign relations. In the lobby of our hotel, she spotted a young Hungarian boy wearing a NASA sweatshirt. Her cover job happens to be working as a NASA engineer, so she pulled a logo pin from her purse and gave it to the boy. The smile on his face could have illuminated Red Square during an evening May Day parade.

After two unsuccessful days of searching, we continued our quest by booking a week-long cruise with Viking on the Danube River. The ship was amazing, the food incredible, and the service immaculate, but we, of course, paid no attention to such trivial details while on the case. The Viking crew prides itself in trying to meet every request from a passenger. In one conversation I overheard, a passenger ignored the gourmet menu offerings and requested a unicorn and peanut-butter sandwich. The Serbian waiter did not flinch, replying “Will that be on ciabatta or pumpernickel bread.” To remain undercover, we also signed up for the Silver Beverage package which gave us unlimited top-shelf wine and liquors while on the cruise. We had taken along our CIA-issued anti-inebriation pills, however, so any signs of intoxication displayed by Columbo or Trebek were actually a carefully choreographed act designed to give false impressions to the unsuspecting passengers and crew. We even pretended to be drunk when we won a bottle of champagne at a ship-board trivia contest.

The next stop was at Vienna, Austria, the scene of a tense Cold War meeting between JFK and Khrushchev in 1961. We learned more than we needed to know about Franz Joseph, the longtime Hapsburg ruler, and Gustav Klimt, the great artist, but it was an amazing, clean, and historic city. We did a walking tour of Vienna, visited the Schoenbrunn palace, and saw sites from the classic film noir movie, The Third Man. As I viewed the iconic Ferris Wheel in a public park, I thought of that film and heard the words of Harry Lime, cynically looking at the city from the heights of that gigantic wheel and observing, “You know in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and blood-shed; but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock !” On our second night in Vienna we attended a concert that featured the works of Mozart and Strauss, with a little opera and ballet thrown in for good measure. For that night, I purchased a rumpled, London Fog overcoat in keeping with the disheveled appearance demanded by my code name. We made no contacts, but Pavlova was apparently reminded of her dancing past, as she shed her shoes on the way out and left the theater walking on the tips of her toes in a perfect exhibition of the pointe technique.

In Vienna, Gottweig, Passau, and Regensberg, we saw cathedrals that had elements of both Gothic and Baroque architecture, and three of them claimed to have the largest pipe organ in the world according to esoteric criteria of one sort or another. I thought I saw a potential contact in one such church, and I surreptitiously followed her beneath the high, vaulted ceilings, dramatic stained glass, and garish, gold decorations. When she slipped behind a large, ornate door, I thought I had her, but as I threw open the door I heard her say, “Segne mich, Vater, denn ich habe gesündigt,” (Bless me Father, for I have sinned), and I knew I had failed again.

In Passau, on the German/Austrian border, our tour guide moved so slowly, used so many rhetorical questions for which he expected answers, and spoke so long about mundane objects, I felt certain that he was speaking to us in code. At one point, we walked at a lazy pace down a narrow medieval alley, and he paused next to some plastic garbage cans. He said, “Zese are ze trash cans. Do you know what zay are used for?” After a long, awkward pause, someone in our group muttered, “Garbage?” He nodded and, in his slow monotone voice,  said, “Ja, ja. Zay are used for ze trash, . . . und ze refuse,  . . . und. . . . ja, even for ze garbage.” After many such thrilling and informative explanations, we realized he was not a spy, just a terrible tour guide. I tipped him five Euros anyway. In fact I handed out five Euro notes to everyone who came within arm’s distance of me, hoping it would lead to a contact with our Russian friends.

Near the middle of our cruise, we were losing hope of ever making a viable contact. As we sat in the ship’s lounge that afternoon, Trebek pulled out her needlepoint of an abstract Klimt pattern and began working on it. It was an effective tool for attracting curious people, and several stopped by to ask about it while I sipped my Maker’s Mark Manhattan. When I was drinking a Sapphire Gin and Tonic, Trebek even sewed her needlepoint to her skirt on purpose in an effort to project an image of ineptitude. I nursed an Ardberg Scotch and water while smiling at the memory of Trebek’s mother using that same gambit while on assignment in Poland in the late ‘80s. It was her needlepoint work that first attracted the attention of labor leader Lech Walesa, and, well . . . the Berlin Wall came down. Finally, a man named Cero approached Trebek with needlepoint questions and we made plans to eat dinner with him that night.

At dinner, our East European waiter suggested a full-bodied red wine called “Trilogie,” and I wondered if that was perhaps a veiled reference to my undercover trio. I casually glanced at his nametag and read, “Milorad.” A Russian name! Eureka, we had found our contact! Alas, an attempted conversation with him proved fruitless, as he spoke only limited English, and we were back to square one. Cero and his husband, Tom, joined us, and we had a dinner of good wine, excellent food, and even better conversation. They turned out to be former physicians, Cero from Brazil, Tom, from the US, and they are now retired in Portugal. After a similar dinner the next night, Tom slipped me a coded letter. It turned out that they were also CIA agents, sent to pull us out of Europe before we damaged international relations any further. I cannot reveal all of the contents of that letter, but they were particularly upset about our bar bill and the cost of my London Fog overcoat.

The next day we found ourselves on a flight from Munich to Chicago, defrocked spies, but harboring a shipload of fond memories. My only regret is that I never got the chance to turn around slowly, scratch my head while holding a dormant cigar, and say, “There’s just one thing I don’t understand . . .”