~ * ~
Delmonico’s, New York City, 1939
A burst of flame swept up from the pan as the tableside chef splashed brandy onto the steak, and the people at the surrounding tables joined them in laughter and applause that seemed to circle ‘round the dining room and linger in the drapery, lending yet more sparkle to the light.
“That’s the show,” Clayton said happily, and in response they all lifted their glasses, Clayton and Caroline, his wife of six months, Danforth and Cecilia Linnartz, his fiancée, blond, with dazzling blue eyes, who seemed still not quite used to the glint of her engagement ring.
“Confusion to the French,” Clayton said as a toast.
Danforth looked at him, puzzled.
“It’s an old Anglo-Saxon toast,” Clayton explained. “My oh-so-English uncle taught it to me.”
They’d driven to Beaver Street in Clayton’s spanking-new car, a gift from his father on his most recent birthday, and during the trip they’d cruised past the remnants of a late-afternoon riot. There’d been a few overturned cars, a couple of them set on fire and still smoldering, and the streets had been strewn with placards. Caroline had looked unsettled by the scene, but she was a nervous girl, Danforth knew, and he liked the way Cecilia, calm and cool, had quickly soothed Caroline’s rattled nerves.
Once they arrived at Delmonico’s, the incident had fled their minds, and for the past few minutes they’d looked very much the happy foursome they were, Clayton talking at full tilt, stopping only to sip his six-olive martini.
“The marble portal out front, did you know it came from Pompeii?” he asked.
“That’s the story that went out,” Danforth said. “But my father doubts it.”
“Why?” Clayton asked.
“Because it would have been very hard to get it out of Italy,” Danforth answered, “Even out of Naples, corrupt though that city is.”
Clayton laughed. “Then it must be a fraud,” he said. “But Danforth Imports can get anything out of anywhere, right, Tom?”
“Right,” Danforth said confidently.
Something sparked in Clayton’s eyes. “A great skill, that,” he said. “A very great skill. You must have many secret devices for spiriting objects of great value in and out of exotic ports of call.”
“That’s a rather grand way of putting it,” Danforth said, “but yes, we do.”
The dinner progressed as it usually did, though it struck Danforth that Clayton often returned to the subject of the family business, the contacts Danforth Imports had throughout Europe, particularly in France and Poland but also in the Balkans, where, as Danforth rightly informed him, order could be found only after one understood the structure of disorder.
They went through the courses and finished off the meal with yet another fiery display, this time baked Alaska. It was ten o’clock before they piled back into Clayton’s car for the drive uptown, where, some fifteen minutes later, Danforth and Cecilia at last found themselves alone in the lobby of Cecilia’s building.
“Caroline’s frightened of everything,” Cecilia said. “I can’t imagine what Clayton sees in her.”
Danforth shrugged. “Men like Clayton often marry women like Caroline. I don’t know why.” He laughed. “Stanley did, you know. The great explorer. His wife rarely left London, and she seemed mostly interested in hats.”
Cecilia said nothing in reply to this, but Danforth could see that she was turning it over in her mind, a thoughtfulness he liked in her and that he considered important in the life they would live together. Had he been asked at that moment if he loved her, he would have said that he did, and he would have believed this to be true. Many years later, as he searched through old papers and followed distant clues, alone in rooms so spartan nothing hung from their walls, he would recall that once he had loved a woman named Cecilia and that if it weren’t for a single, decisive choice, he would have married her and lived his life with her. She would have been the full measure of what he knew of love, their life together a glass that — because he knew no other — he would forever have taken to be full.
Finally, as if something about him had troubled her, she said, “You’re happy with me, aren’t you, Tom?”
“Of course I am,” Danforth assured her.
A few minutes later, in a taxi going home, he recalled that moment, and it returned him to his earlier life: how he and his father had traveled over the wildest terrains, eaten things that could scarcely be imagined, part of his training to run the family business. The actual running of it had eased him into a far more comfortable world, however, and now those earlier times were like dreams from childhood or stories he’d read in a boys’ adventure book. Lately he’d begun to wonder if everything had been experienced too early, absorbed by a mind too immature to provide much resonance to the man he later became. In fact, on those occasions when he couldn’t prevent a certain uneasiness from creeping over him, he suspected that time was slowly dissolving all save the most harrowing episodes of those dramatic years — the stormy ferry ride to Cozumel, the wind that had nearly blown him off the Cliffs of Moher — and that since his youth he’d added nothing to his ever-dwindling store.
He felt a familiar discontent and turned to work, his no less familiar route of escape. He’d brought the usual briefcase of papers home with him earlier that day, and he now set about going through them.
He’d completed about half the evening’s tasks when the phone rang.
It was Clayton.
“Do me a favor, Tom. Go to your front window and look to the right, the northwest corner of Madison and Sixty-fifth.”
“What?” Danforth asked with a faint laugh.
“Come on, just do it.”
Danforth put down the phone, walked to his front window, drew back the drapes, and looked out. The streets were deserted at that hour; he saw only a single figure, a man wearing a dark hat pulled down low, slouching against the corner of the building at Madison and Sixty-fifth.
“All right, I looked,” Danforth said.
“And saw a man, right? Leaning against the corner building.”
“Yes,” Danforth said warily. “How did you know?”
“I know because I’m in the bar across the street from that corner. I can see him very clearly.”
Danforth looked at the clock across the room. “That bar closed an hour ago, Robert.”
Clayton’s laugh was entirely relaxed. “I thought you’d know that. It’s good to be aware of your surroundings.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Danforth told him.
A steely seriousness came into Clayton’s voice. “How about we meet at the Old Town Bar tomorrow evening?” he said. “Say, seven thirty?”
~ * ~
Century Club, New York City, 2001
“So, Clayton was looking for certain characteristics in you,” I said, a banal question, I knew, designed merely to keep Danforth talking, since I would never return to my bosses in Washington without completing an assignment, even one as ultimately un-enlightening as I expected this interview to be. “That you were a man who observed his surroundings.”
“A penetrating glimpse into the obvious, Paul,” Danforth said.
I gave Danforth no indication that his “penetrating glimpse into the obvious” remark offended me, though it did. Still, I could see that the real purpose of this statement had been to warn me against indulging him with even the most glancing flattery.
“He was evaluating you though, wasn’t he?” I asked. I once again positioned pen and paper in a way that gave the impression that Danforth’s answers were important. “Your strengths, I mean.”
Danforth shook his head. “No. He was looking for my weaknesses. Not of character, however. He was looking for cracks in me, little places he could enter. He already knew what he wanted me to do. He just didn’t know if I would do it. That’s what that little trick with the man on the corner was all about. It was like a scent he released in the air.”
“
A scent of what?”
“Mystery, what else?” Danforth answered. “He wanted me to know that he had something on his mind. He wanted me to be curious about what it was. It’s the simplest way to draw someone into a plot. You make them want to know what you know.” He shrugged. “Anyway, Clayton was just working a bit of a shell game with that guy on the corner. A touch of legerdemain.”
“Did it work?” I asked. “Did you meet him at the Old Town Bar?”
Danforth nodded. “Of course I did,” he said. “I thought I could hear whatever was on his mind and not be in the least seduced by it.” His smile emerged like a tiny ray from the belly of a cave. “But I wasn’t prepared for what happened there.”
~ * ~
Old Town Bar, New York City, 1939
Danforth brushed the snow from the shoulders of his overcoat and slapped it from his hat. The interior of the bar was dark in a way that mirrored the times, at least insofar as he had come to see them, everything dimly lit and faintly threatening, a sense of an old world dying, the new one as yet uncertain, inevitably forming but perhaps misshapen, “a monster-making age,” as Clayton had recently called it. Yet another rally had ignited more street violence that very afternoon. A few cars had been overturned and set ablaze on Tenth Avenue, according to the radio, and the whole city was on edge. Danforth had seen a company of mounted police make their solemn way toward Union Square as he’d walked from his office, all of them grim-faced and expecting the worst, if not tonight, then sometime soon. There was a sense, everywhere and in everything, of lives ripped from the old bonds of steady work and stable families, a great cloth unraveling.
As he always did in an unfamiliar setting, Danforth took a moment to locate himself, take in his surroundings. He noted the hours of accumulated cigarette smoke that had gathered and now curled beneath the bar’s pressed-tin ceiling. The smell of bar food hung lower and more heavily: grease, ketchup, a hint of onion. A group of regulars occupied the stools at the front, manual laborers clothed head to foot in flannel, broad shoulders slightly hunched, big hands curled around mugs of beer. Danforth could not imagine what they talked about in the gloomy light. But at least these men had jobs, unlike those who’d taken up residence in the city parks or erected shantytowns along the river. There was an explosive quality to the enforced idleness of unemployed men, Danforth thought, something both inert and volatile, like a damp fuse drying. They would rip down a forest to make a campfire, and who could stand in the winds that blew then? Certainly not himself, Danforth knew, nor any of his well-heeled kind.
The barman gave him a quizzical look.
Danforth nodded toward the empty tables at the back.
“Anywhere you want,” the barman said, then returned to the regulars, who were clearly more his sort — wore caps instead of hats, frayed woolen jackets rather than Danforth’s immaculate cashmere.
Clayton had suggested the place and Danforth hadn’t bothered to question it. Eighteenth Street wasn’t far from Union Square, the offices of Danforth Imports. Still, the Old Town Bar seemed a strange choice, and he was surprised that Clayton even knew about it. And yet that was precisely the part of his friend that he both enjoyed and admired, that from out of nowhere he would demonstrate a knowledge or familiarity he’d previously kept concealed. He gambled in back-alley crap games, that much Danforth knew, and seemed to enjoy an occasional excursion into the edgier reaches of the city, Harlem dance clubs and the basement bars along the waterfront. At college, he’d regularly smuggled bootleg hooch into their fraternity house, cases of it borne up the stairs by men who scarcely spoke English and dealt only in cash. The man who had slouched at the corner of Sixty-fifth and Madison had no doubt been one of Clayton’s shadowy army of demimonde contacts.
He walked back toward a table he’d selected almost the instant he’d come into the bar, in much the same way a hunted man might locate the nearest exit. He knew that there was something primitive in this, something not altogether rational, something he thought might serve a soldier better than an importer. For that reason, he’d found a secret anticipation in the rattling rumors of European war, even an obscene but reflexive hope that they might prove true. It was the hope of a young man, he knew, and a foolish one at that. The two uncles buried in the American cemetery at Romagne reminded him that war could prove fatal, so any time he allowed himself to anticipate it with anything but dread, he also made himself recall the long rows of white crosses he’d seen in that sweeping burial ground. But even in this memory, a glimmer of war’s romance managed to peek through: he also recalled the visitors’ book at Romagne, how in so many distinctly different hands, the French had written the simple, elegant merci.
A barmaid swam out of the gloom a few minutes after he took his seat, a woman clearly recruited from the kitchen staff. The greasy apron proved that, along with the damp washcloth that hung around her neck.
“What can I get you?” she asked.
The Old Town Bar was no place for a dry martini.
“Scotch,” Danforth said. “Straight up.”
While he waited, Danforth went over the day’s usual business problems: delays in shipments, boats waylaid by storms, and always, always, overland disruptions in Manchuria. In the Orient, the actual nature of the obstacle was rarely clear, but then what did it matter if a mountain pass was blocked by a blizzard or by the thievish whim of some local warlord? In the importing business, his father had taught him, one learned to accept the inscrutable. There was no other enterprise on earth, according to the elder Danforth, that more fully and continually confronted hazard: shipments inundated by swollen rivers or buried in avalanches, trains seized by starving mobs or expropriated by revolutionaries, and if the merchandise did not fall victim to any of these, then it was held captive by greedy functionaries intent on expanding bribery’s already more than generous largesse. Importation operated like the universe, as Danforth had come to see it: irrationally and violently, with something vaguely criminal at its core.
The bar door burst open and Clayton came through it, stopped, stomped the snow from his shoes, then peered about expectantly.
Danforth lifted his hand.
Clayton nodded briskly and headed toward him, rubbing his glasses with a white handkerchief. He’d returned them to his face by the time he reached the table.
“It’s like the Blizzard of Eighty-three out there,” he said.
Clayton worked as a photography archivist for the library on Forty-second Street, a job secured for him, no doubt, by the large annual contribution his family made to the library. He specialized in New York City history; his head was filled with black-and-white images of its storied past. Danforth knew with certainty that at the mention of the 1883 blizzard, Clayton’s mind had instantly offered up striking pictures of that peculiar disaster: a city locked in great drifts of ghostly pale; horses buried in harness, their heads protruding from white mounds, stiff as bookends.
“Have you been here long?” Clayton asked.
“Only a few minutes.”
He pulled off his coat and draped it over an empty chair but left his red scarf around his neck and shoulders. “This place seems quite cozy, don’t you think?”
The barmaid lumbered over. Clayton ordered a vodka tonic with lime.
“So,” he said once it was just the two of them again, “how are things in imports?”
“A family business is a family business,” Danforth answered. “I liked the training better than the mission.”
“Imagine how bored you’ll be at thirty,” Clayton said with a quick smile.
Both of the drinks came a moment later. They lifted them but toasted nothing.
Clayton put down his glass firmly “What’s the most frightened you’ve ever been, Tom?”
It was an odd question, Danforth thought, and yet he instantly recalled the incident quite vividly
“I was seven years old,” he answered. “My father and I were in Romania. The train suddenly stopped very hard, so you knew the brakema
n had seen something unexpected up ahead. In this case it was a man hanging from a cross.”
Clayton’s gaze intensified. “A cross?”
“Yes,” Danforth answered. “As in Calvary. It had been raised beside the tracks at the end of a mountain pass, and several men with rifles were standing on the railroad bed. A bandit with a dagger ordered us out of the train to see it. There was never a word after that. Other bandits came out of the woods and simply walked among the passengers, taking whatever they liked. They nodded toward your pockets and you emptied them. They nodded toward your watch and you gave it to them. I noticed that my father’s fingers were trembling. I’d never seen him frightened, and I said to myself, ‘Well, I guess you don’t fool around with men who nail other men to crosses.’”