asked. “The one with Cary Grant?”
“Yes,” Danforth said. His tone took on a slight eeriness, as if his story had now become one of strange occurrences, though the sort that were more ironic than supernatural, the freakishness of real life. “It happened just like that.” He nodded in the general direction of the club’s entrance. “Right there.”
~ * ~
Century Club, New York City, 1939
The rain had begun just as Danforth stepped out of the Century Club. He didn’t have an umbrella, and so he turned to the left, toward Fifth Avenue, planning to sprint to the corner, find a shop, buy an umbrella. That was when he felt a grip on his arm that was sharper than any he had ever known; when he looked down toward the grasp that held him, he half expected to see black talons rather than a hand. Then he felt a similar grip on his other arm.
He saw two men, one on either side of him.
“Don’t speak,” the man to his left said gruffly. He was dressed in a dark blue double-breasted suit and wore a gray fedora. “You’re dead if you do.”
The second man wore a brown suit, also double-breasted, but no hat. He nodded toward a car that idled beside the curb just at the club’s entrance. A third man, this one in a dark green single-breasted suit and wearing a brown hat, had already opened the door and seemed to be grimly awaiting Danforth’s decision.
“Move forward and don’t speak,” the man in the fedora said.
The one in the brown suit tightened his grip but then added a slight, surprisingly warm smile. “You’re too young to die, Mr. Danforth.”
It was dread, and dread alone, that swept over Danforth in what he would always remember as an intense wave of heat that emptied and confused him and in an instant sucked away his will to resist these men. It was as if the sun had suddenly focused all its fiery blast upon the tiny puddle of himself, leaving him dry and dusty, and strangely dead to any sense of himself other than the physical. He was no longer mind or heart. He was only the body that encased his life, which was in dire peril.
“Move,” the man in the dark blue suit said sharply.
Almost without willing it, Danforth drifted forward like a dazed creature floating in the aftermath of some shock, and seconds later he was seated snugly between the men who’d grabbed him, the man in the green suit at the wheel.
He had not spoken, and this muteness surprised him. He felt like a child between two enormously imposing and unstable parents, unable to question what they did or in any way predict their behavior.
The car headed north on Broadway, and as it moved, Danforth strung enough of his senses together to begin to contemplate the silent, stern-faced men between whom he was tightly wedged. Who were they? What were they after? Was he being kidnapped? He briefly tried to guess what his father’s reaction might be to that first phone call, how much ransom he might actually pay. This idea gave way to the equally far-fetched notion that this bizarre abduction might be the result of some business dispute of his father’s. The elder Danforth often handled people quite roughly, so it seemed possible that some dissatisfied client or subcontractor might have decided that the usual avenues of redress against his father’s high-handedness were far too slow and uncertain.
Then, quite suddenly, it became obvious that both of these surmises were dead wrong. It was then and only then that he thought of the Project and considered the possibility that the fear Bannion had expressed and LaRoche had later seconded had been justified all along, that they were truly out there, these American storm troopers, and that Danforth was now in their hands.
The northern reaches of Manhattan faded behind him, and he suddenly felt unmoored from New York. The city had seemed permanent before, a castle that protected him, and he had thought it changeless and certain. Now it was just a place weakened by events, no longer able to provide the slightest comfort, and in that incapacity, it seemed almost to mock him, as if all his life he’d been fooled by the city, lulled into a pleasant sleep from which he had now been roughly awakened.
The Bronx came and went, and after it, the squat streets of Yonkers. An hour passed, perhaps more. They were in Connecticut, the outskirts of one of its industrial towns, an area of crumbling and abandoned warehouses, with dark brick and black roofs and everywhere a dull patina of grime and soot.
The car bumped violently over a badly pitted street, then made a sharp left toward a large brick building with a loading dock and concrete ramp that led into the black bowels of the building. Once inside, they sat in that near total darkness for a few seconds, and then, as if responding to a signal Danforth couldn’t see, Fedora got out of the car and turned to Danforth.
“You can get out now,” Fedora said with unexpected gentleness, as if it were an option rather than an order.
Danforth pulled himself out of the car and stood very stiffly in the darkness, fully a child now, awaiting orders, afraid that any move he made would be the wrong one.
“Come with me,” Fedora commanded.
By then the other two men were at his side and behind him, and in this formation they moved toward a metal door that opened just before they reached it.
The room was very small, with an iron bed and a bare mattress. A single lightbulb hung from a black cord. The walls were bare, and the ceiling was streaked with water stains. The sweet smell of mold thickened the air and gave it a musty taste. There was no sink or toilet, and so Danforth knew he would not be held there long, that this was a kind of purgatory, the place where he was to wait.
“If you choose to be a spy,” Fedora told him as he closed the door, “you should get used to the life.”
He would never be sure how long he remained alone in this room, but years later, as he stood before the starvation cells of Auschwitz, he would recall the terrible sense of confinement that had overtaken him, and how much more confined the Auschwitz prisoners must have felt with not even the space needed to sit down, able only to stand and face bare concrete walls until they died.
Time passed, but the men had taken his watch and his wallet before leaving him in the room, and so he had no idea how much time had passed, though he felt sure that the sun had gone down before the door of the room finally swung open again.
