actually believe the opposite.”
I sensed that this last remark had returned Danforth to his subject.
“Did Clayton believe in whatever he was doing?” I asked.
“Clayton believed absolutely in what he was doing,” Danforth answered. “There was never anything confused or addled about him, nothing in disarray.”
“Not like that woman in the bar, then,” I said, to demonstrate that I’d been listening closely to his tale.
“No,” Danforth said, “nothing like that woman in the bar. Who walked straight to the rear of the place that night, by the way.” His gaze grew distant, a man sinking back into the past. “As a matter of fact, she came so close to me a clump of snow fell off her coat and landed on mine.”
~ * ~
Old Town Bar, New York City, 1939
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said.
As the woman had gone by, a clump of snow had fallen from the bundle of woolens she held and dropped onto Danforth’s overcoat.
“Nothing to worry about,” Danforth told her gently. He noted her face, how young it was, the tragedy of her derangement doubled by her youth.
The woman frantically brushed the snow from the shoulder of Danforth’s coat. “You got a nice coat,” she said. Their eyes met. “It ain’t ruined, is it?”
“Not at all,” Danforth answered. “Really. Nothing to worry about.”
A crooked little smile appeared. “I thought I got that snow off me,” she said with a quick, self-conscious laugh. “But it ain’t easy to get off you once you got it on you.”
“No harm done,” Danforth told her. “It’s just snow.”
Her smile struggled for and lost its place, a string by turns taut and slack. “Anyway, sorry.”
“Nothing to worry about,” Danforth assured her again.
With that, the woman turned and made her way to a table in the far corner. She sat down and fussed with her things, her scarf, her coat, a cloth bag with a long strap, all of which appeared to fight her, making her movements grow more frustrated, almost comically so, as she labored to subdue them. During all of this, she seemed the victim of some vast, inner disarray, one of the city’s future street grotesques, a young woman prematurely sinking into the idiosyncrasies that would doubtless overwhelm her middle years.
“That one will end up in Bellevue,” he said sadly.
“Do you think so, Tom?”
“I do indeed,” Danforth answered firmly. “My God, Robert, that woman couldn’t —”
The glimmer in Clayton’s eyes stopped him cold.
“What?”
“Her code name is Lingua,” Clayton said.
“Code name?”
Clayton glanced to the back of the room. The woman had removed her scarf, revealing a disordered mop of dark, curly hair. “She’s had a rather hard life.”
Danforth’s eyes shot over to the woman in question, her small body still jerkily grappling with an assortment of gear that appeared at every stage determined to thwart her.
Clayton returned his gaze tc Danforth. “So small,” he said. “Not even five two. Perhaps a hundred pounds.” He lifted his hand, and when the barmaid came over, he ordered another round for the two of them. “She’s a genius at languages,” he added once the barmaid had stepped away. “Hence her code name.”
Danforth leaned forward. “What are you telling me, Clayton? That this woman is a ... I don’t even know what to call her.”
Clayton crushed out his cigarette and lit another one. “Her assignment for this evening was to come to the Old Town Bar at precisely seven forty-three. I would be smoking a cigarette. If I wasn’t wearing a red scarf, she was to take a table, have a drink, but in no way approach me or draw attention to herself. If I was wearing the scarf, however, she was to sweep by my table and on some pretext or other get a good look at whomever I was with.” He leaned forward. “And she was to do it in such a way that the person I was with would notice her, so that at any point in the future I could say, ‘Remember that woman in the Old Town Bar?’ and my companion would know instantly whom I was talking about.” He took another draw on his cigarette. “If you hadn’t been here, that convenient clump of snow would simply have melted.” He glanced at his watch and when his eyes lifted toward Danforth again, they were quite grave. “Let’s take a walk, Tom. I want to speak to you very seriously now.”
They got to their feet, left money on the table, and headed for the door. Before going out, Danforth glanced toward the back of the bar, where Code Name Lingua sat; her profile was now blocked by the barmaid, so he could see only a chaos of black curly hair and the small, still madly flitting hands.
Outside, the snow had lightened, but enough had already fallen to cover the sidewalks. A trail of gray footprints followed them westward, then north on Park Avenue, until they reached the wintry stillness of Gramercy Park.
Clayton drew the red scarf more snugly around his neck. “Have you ever heard of Geli Raubal?”
Danforth shook his head.
“She was Hitler’s niece,” Clayton said. “She was found shot dead in a room in her uncle’s apartment in Munich. She used her uncle’s Walther. But Hitler was clearly not in Munich when it happened, and although Geli was shot in the chest when her head was perfectly available to her, the death was ruled a suicide.”
