after all, and besides, it was always possible that some little jewel of useful information might be gleaned along the way.
Still, I wanted to hoe a more or less straight row, which is why I made my next statement. “They all spoke several languages. The people recruited for the . . . Project.”
“How do you know that?”
“Robert Clayton’s report to the State Department,” I answered. “I have to say it makes for rather interesting reading, all that cloak-and-dagger business.”
“How old are you, Paul?” Something in Danforth’s voice was at once hard and tender, both the scar and the flesh beneath it.
“Twenty-four.”
Danforth nodded. “At around your age, I was a callow young man, running the family business. Picture me, if you can.” He seemed to disappear down the long tunnel of his own past. “A young man with plenty of money and a lovely fiancee, dressed to the nines, having dinner at Delmonico’s.”
~ * ~
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 fiancee, 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
