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 brakeman 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.’”
“That’s quite an experience,” Clayton said.
Danforth recalled the flat look in the bandits’ eyes, how lightless they’d been, utterly without sparkle. “Dead souls are very scary, Robert.”
“Dead souls,” Clayton repeated. He was silent for a moment, then his gaze took on an unexpected urgency. “All your travels, the nature of your business, your command of several languages. It struck me last night at Delmonico’s that you’d be the perfect man for a secret mission.”
“A secret mission; I can see it now,” Danforth said with a laugh. “Sipping a kummel at the Hermitage. Meeting shadowy figures on a park bench in Vienna. Learning how to make invisible ink.”
“That would be equal parts baking soda and water,” Clayton said matter-of-factly. “Write with a toothpick on white paper. Then hold the paper to a heat source, and your message will appear in brown.”
“You’re kidding me,” Danforth said.
“Not at all,” Clayton said quite gravely. He took a sip from his drink. “So now you know how to make invisible ink, Tom.”
Danforth waved his hand dismissively. “Forgive me, Robert, but this all sounds like play-acting.”
“Believe me, it’s more serious than that,” Clayton said solemnly “It might even have an influence on history.”
“An influence on history?” Danforth asked. “That’s an ambitious project, even for you.”
“Project,” Clayton said. “That’s a good word for it. We’ll call it that from now on. The Project.” He glanced at his watch. “Seven forty-five,” he said with a quick smile. “Our lives pass so quickly, don’t they, Tom?”
Danforth gave no response to this deadly familiar philosophical aside and instead took a sip of his drink.
At the front of the bar, a few more customers came in: a couple of men who were obviously regulars, and a bedraggled young woman who seemed unsure if she was in the right place.
“We have so little time to make lasting memories,” Clayton added.
Danforth watched as the men huddled up to the bar and left the woman to stand alone, looking frazzled and forlorn, like an animal cut from the herd because it was sick or wounded. In the woman’s case, it seemed due to some mental confusion or disorientation. She stared about almost vacantly, her gaze wandering the room in uncertain fits and starts, as if she were following the flight of an invisible butterfly.
There was something poignant in the scene, Danforth thought. “We’re like animals, really,” he said, almost to himself.
“Animals?” Clayton asked. “In what way?”
The woman now seemed to be overtaken by the throes of a manic seizure, her movements very quick and contorted. A few people at the bar had begun to watch her. Some were grinning in a cruel way that completely undercut the great Communist romance; these noble workers were no more generous to this fellow lost soul than they would be to one another when the wolf was at the door.
“In the way we have no mercy for the weak,” Danforth said as he watched the scene play out at the front of the bar.
Clayton laughed. “You’re a sentimentalist, Tom. What the Irish call a harp.”
“Maybe I am,” Danforth admitted.
The people at the bar were now entirely taken up in cruel amusement, watching with jagged smiles as the woman pulled off her wool cap, dropped it, picked it up, worked to find a place for it, found that place in the pocket of her coat. Her every movement betrayed her solitary vagabondage, how in this teeming city, she was wandering alone.
“Maybe I am,” Danforth repeated.
By the time Clayton turned around to face her, the woman had unwound a ragged scarf from her neck and was tromping back toward the rear of the bar.
“The city is full of nuts,” Clayton said. He appeared mildly annoyed that Danforth continued to be distracted by the woman. “If she comes this way, just give her a few coins.” He drew a pack of cigarettes from his jacket and thumped one out. “They’re everywhere now,” he added irritably. “These goddamn nuts.”
~ * ~
Century Club, New York City, 2001
“You must be thinking that Clayton was not exactly a man of the people,” Danforth said with an arid chuckle.
“He does seem very old-school,” I admitted. “But the intelligence agency recruited pretty much exclusively from those ranks back then, didn’t it?”
“Yes, it did,” Danforth said.
“The good news is that our boys weren’t like those upper-class Brits who ended up so disloyal, spying for Mother Russia,” I added. “Philby, Burgess, and the rest. Traitors all.”
“And all equally to be condemned,” Danforth said.
“Of course,” I agreed.
“Even if they believed in their cause?” Danforth asked.
“I wouldn’t care what they believed,” I answered.
Danforth’s gaze betrayed a curious complexity, as if the memory of something won or lost had suddenly returned to him. “Indeed,” he said softly, as if reviewing an old decision or coming to a new one.
“Of course, most of them were fools,” I said, determined to show Danforth that I knew my espionage history, could recite a few details. “The Cambridge Five. Imagine that group, dashing around Europe, delivering a codebook on Gibraltar, like Philby did.” I laughed derisively. “They always struck me as buffoons.”
“Or posing as such,” Danforth said. “There is a lot of acting in this business. Pretending to be afraid. Pretending to be brave. Even pretending to be in love.”
“That would be a cruel pretense, wouldn’t it?” I said.
“Yes, it would,” Danforth answered firmly “Perhaps as cruel as pretending to believe in something when you
