“Of course,” I answered.
In fact, I’d read a great deal about that instability: streets filled with the angry dispossessed. Rallies, protests, mobs that surged and withdrew in enormous, roaring waves. Communists gaining influence. Fascists too. Those had been interesting times, no doubt, but Danforth’s backward drift smacked of the mental vis-cosity common to people of his age, and I simply had no time for it.
“Your activity before the war,” I said. “How did you —”
“We called it the Project,” Danforth corrected firmly. “I later came to believe that the name lacked resonance, that it gave no sense of what had actually been involved. Not like Nacht und Nebel, certainly. Which sounds pretty scary and said what it was.”
I looked at him quizzically.
“‘Night and Fog,’” Danforth translated. “The German policy of sending prisoners to camps where they would disappear into, as it were, night and fog.” He smiled in a way that suggested not only that my understanding of the Project might be less than accurate but also that he would not be rushed into his discussion of it. “And do forgive me for drifting into modal verbs. Would this and would that. It’s a habit I have, reflecting on things while I talk about him.” He laughed softly. “I also tend to drift into asides.”
“Asides?”
“For example, there’s a castle in Vincennes, on the outskirts of Paris,” he said quietly. “Diderot was imprisoned there. So was the Marquis de Sade. Just think of it, Mr. Crane —”
“Paul,” I said, to establish a slightly less formal mood. “Please, call me Paul.”
“Very well, just think of it, Paul,” Danforth went on. “The two poles of human thought within a few yards of each other. The reasoning of a philosopher and the ravings of a psychopath.”
“Why did you happen to think of this aside just now?” I asked.
“I suppose because the castle was used for executions as well as a prison,” he answered.
He went on to discuss the various times he’d been to the chateau at Vincennes, what he would have felt on his first visit had he known of the ones to come, what he would have made certain to see and recall, because these small things would speak to him eloquently and with great poignancy at a later time.
“We act in the present tense and recall in the past tense,” he said at one point. “But we reflect in the conditional and regret in the subjunctive.”
“I’m aware that you are a very gifted student of languages,” I told him, in case he’d been laboring to impress me with that point. I drew a notebook and pen from my jacket pocket and pretended that his answer to my next question was worth recording. “What languages do you speak?”
He spoke quite a few, as it turned out, and as he listed them, I took the opportunity to look him over as I’d been trained to do, evaluate and assess his fitness as a source.
Thomas Jefferson Danforth was ninety-one years old, but his eyes were sharp, and, save for the occasional wince of discomfort, there was little of the creakiness of age in the way he shifted his body or reached for his glass. His mind was obviously quite clear, and his voice never faltered. He might go off the beaten track, but so far his asides had remained tangentially connected to the topic of discussion.
“You mentioned Vincennes,” I remindent him when he reached the last of his languages.
“Mata Hari was executed at Vincennes,” Danforth said with deliberation, the way an etymologist might turn a phrase over in his mind, review the origin of each word, ponder its many facets and vagaries. “And the Germans executed thirty people there in 1944. I once went through the list.”
“Why?”
“Looking for a name,” Danforth said. “And do you know, Paul, the feel of a murder site changes when you know someone who was murdered there.”
“You knew someone who was killed at Vincennes?”
Danforth shook his head. “No, but I thought I might have,” he answered almost casually. “At Vincennes, I was just looking. I did a lot of that after the war.”
“After the war,” I said coaxingly. “So that had nothing to do with the Project?”
“Not all things end abruptly,” Danforth said matter-of-factly. “And some things never do. Acts of war, for example. They ripple on forever.”
This line of talk seemed not at all germane, and so I said, “You were in the army, I believe?”
“Working in London,” Danforth said. “Translating intelligence reports from all over Europe.” He appeared to scan those years for a relevant memory. “I remember a particular contact. A priest, as it happened. His communiqués about Drancy were quite heartbreaking. What happened to the children there, I mean. He claimed to have heard their cries from the steps of Sacré Coeur.”
“But that wouldn’t have been possible,” I said in a rather too obvious effort to show that, for all my youth and limited travel, I was at least familiar with Paris and its environs. “The distance would have been too great.”
Danforth’s smile seemed indulgent, a worldly old man educating an unworldly youthful one. “No distance is too far for guilt to travel.” He shrugged. “But yes, the priest was no doubt speaking metaphorically.”
Despite his faintly pedagogical, didactic air, I had to admit that a certain gravity emanated from Danforth, an intense centeredness; reason enough, I decided, to play it his way a few minutes longer, go at things a little less directly than I’d planned, allow him the occasional digression. Such mental wandering was typical of advanced age, 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 fiancée, 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 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 i
t 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 Dan-forth 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 Dan-forth 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 up-town, 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 fam-ily business. Th e 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 unenlightening 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 offi ce, 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 unravelin
g.
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. Dan-forth 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 offi ces 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.
Quest for Anna Klein, The Page 2