Peril

STARK

He sipped a martini and watched the traffic move haltingly along Fifty-ninth Street. The Oak Bar was one of his favorite haunts. He liked the dark wood and whispery conversations, the well-dressed men and women who sat together at the polished tables. He wanted the men to be arms dealers and the women to be spies, the bar itself suffused with a supercharged intrigue, something out of Cold War Vienna, the icy cat-and-mouse world of The Third Man, where the only safety lay in secrecy and self-containment. In reality, the Oak Bar had nothing of this atmosphere. It was filled with out-of-towners and conventioneers. But Stark preferred to imagine it otherwise, a bar that shimmered distantly, enclosed in an elegant worldliness, cool, sophisticated, where his heart could rest unperturbed, like an olive at the bottom of a glass.

The woman who slid into the table next to his a few minutes later was in her mid-forties, but some good work had taken off a decade. She wore a dark blue skirt and white satin blouse that was partially covered by a silk scarf, black with small red roses. A gold dragon with large ruby eyes was pinned just above her right breast, wings spread, mouth open, fangs at the ready. He knew that she’d chosen it to signal that beneath the conservative clothes a voluptuous serpent twined. She ordered a brandy Alexander, swirled it with her little finger, sucked at a long, polished nail.

“I’m Evelyn,” she said finally.

He nodded.

“And you are?”

“Whomever you like.”

He’d responded in this way many times before, and so had learned that the woman in question either laughed and asked another question, or with a disgruntled shrug turned back to her drink and her quest, the distant hope that the next guy she approached would have no such obvious quirk.

The one called Evelyn laughed and swirled her drink. “Okay, let me think. Suppose I name you Frank.”

He offered his hand. “Frank,” he said. “A pleasure.”

She laughed again as she took his hand. There was a slight pink stain on her straight white teeth, and this imperfection lightly touched the small, unhardened part of him. In objects, he looked for perfection, but in people, the chipped and the cracked, the all-but-invisible fray at the hem.

“And what do you do… Frank?”

“Whatever you say,” he told her.

A carefully tweezed eyebrow drew into a lovely arch. “Really, you won’t tell me what you do?”

“It’s better if you make it up.”

She looked at him distantly, as if unsure if he was what she really wanted, whether what she saw in him offered merely the allure of danger or the real thing.

“Okay, I’ll play along,” she said. “Let’s say you’re some kind of secret agent.”

He leaned forward and looked at her gravely. His whisper was charged with conspiracy. “Our country is in danger, and I desperately need your help.”

She laughed. “I’ll bet you sell insurance. I’ll bet your name’s Harry and you’re from Spokane.”

“I’ll be Harry if you want.”

“No.” She took a sip of the brandy Alexander. “No, I like your story better. Our country is in danger and you desperately need”-she hesitated, then released her final word like a small, wounded bird-“me.”