The Quest for Anna Klein

~ * ~

The Quest for Anna Klein

Thomas H. Cook

PART 1

The Slenderness of Bones

~ * ~

Century Club, New York City, 2001

The question was never whether she would live or die, for that had been decided long ago.

Danforth had said this flatly at one point deep in our conversation, a conclusion he’d evidently come to by way of a painful journey.

It had taken time for him to reach this particular remark. As I’d learned by then, he was a man who kept to his own measured pace. After our initial greeting, for example, he’d taken an agonizingly slow sip from his scotch and offered a quiet, grand-fatherly smile. “People in their clubs,” he said softly. “Isn’t that how Fitzgerald put it? People in their clubs who set down their drinks and recalled their old best dreams. I must seem that way to you. An old man with a head full of woolly memories.” His smile was like an arrow launched from a great distance. “But even old men can be dangerous.”

I’d come to New York from Washington, traveled from one stricken city to another, it seemed, a novice member of the think tank that had recently hired me. My older colleagues had manned the desks of what had once been called Soviet Studies. They’d been very assiduous in these studies. There’d hardly been a ruble spent on missiles or manure that they hadn’t recorded and scrutinized. But for all that, not one of them had foreseen the abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union, how it would simply dissolve into the liquefying fat of its own simmering corruption. That stunning failure in forecasting had shaken their confidence to the core and sent them scrambling for an explanation. They’d still been searching for it years later when the attack had come even more staggeringly out of nowhere. That had been a far graver failure to understand the enemy at our gates, and it had sharply, and quite conveniently for me, changed their focus. Now I, the youngest of their number, their latest hire, had been dispatched to interview Thomas Jefferson Danforth, a man I’d never heard of but who’d written to tell me that he had “experience” that might prove useful, as he’d put it, to “policymakers” such as myself, “especially now.” The interview was not a prospect I relished, and I knew it to be the sort of task doled out to freshman colleagues more or less as a training exercise, but it was better than standing guard at the copying machine or fetching great stacks of research materials from the bowels of various government agencies.

“I remember that line of Fitzgerald’s,” I told Danforth, just to let him know that, although a mere wisp of a boy by his lights, I was well educated, perhaps even a tad worldly. “It was about Lindbergh. How ‘people set down their glasses in country clubs,’ struck by what he’d done.”

“A solo flight across the Atlantic that reminded them of what they’d once been or had hoped to be,” Danforth added. Now his smile suddenly seemed deeply weighted, like a bet against the odds. “Youth is a country with closed borders,” he said. “All that’s valuable must be smuggled in.”

I assumed this remark was rhetorical and found it somewhat condescending, but our conversation had just begun and so I let it pass.

Danforth winced as he shifted in his chair. “Old bones,” he explained. “So, what is your mission, Mr. Crane? The grand one, I mean.”

“Our country’s good,” I answered. “Is that grand enough?”

What remained of Danforth’s smile vanished. “I was young like you.” His voice was even, his tone cautionary, as if he regarded my youth as an animal that could easily turn on me. “Clever and self-confident. It was a very good feeling, as I recall.”

He’d been described to me as reticent, distant, somber, and his experience in what my senior associates still called “the great game” had been brief and long ago. For these reasons, I’d concluded that in all likelihood he could offer little of value to the present situation. But in the still-settling dust of the Towers’ collapse, every corner was being searched, every source, no matter how remote and seemingly irrelevant, gleaned for information. The gyroscope at the center of our expertise had been struck by those planes — so the thinking went — and it had wobbled, and now all its movements had to be recalibrated.

And so, after reading Danforth’s letter, Dr. Carlson had decided that Danforth might have something to add to our intelligence. He’d told me that Danforth did not give interviews, so it was quite surprising that I’d been singled out for this audience.

“Have you ever met the old buzzard?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Then why you, Paul?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Maybe he saw that little piece I wrote in Policy Options.”

“Oh, well,” Dr. Carlson said. “At least you’ll get to see the Century Club.”

Which was indeed something of a treat, I had to admit, as I glanced about the room in which Danforth and I now faced each other, its bookshelves lined with works written by the club’s members.

“A very impressive place,” I said.

“If one is easily impressed,” Danforth replied with a slight smile. “I read your article on the current crisis. You seem very certain, I must say, in regard to what should be done.”

I shrugged. “It’s not really a very prestigious publication,” I told him with slightly feigned modesty. “More of an opinion sampler where graduate students attempt to get noticed. Which I did, evidently. By you.”

“Your father was a professor of foreign affairs,” Danforth said.

My father’s position at a rather modest little college had been mentioned in the brief biography that accompanied my article, so I wasn’t surprised that Danforth was aware of it. Still, there was an air of clandestine knowledge in his tone; he seemed to carry, almost like a mark upon his brow, the faded brand of a spy.

“Yes, he was,” I told him. “He never made policy, of course . . .”

“Which is clearly what you hope to do?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm,” Danforth said. He drew a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and read. “‘Our response should flow from passion as much as policy, and should bear with it a hint of the paranoid.’” He looked at me quite seriously. “So there should be no irrationality gap between ourselves and our enemies.”

His remark held no mockery, it seemed to me; Danforth truly appeared to be considering what I’d written.

“My point is that now is not a time for half measures,” I replied. “Not in the face of these medievalists.”

“The target is all,” Danforth said. “Picking it and destroying it. Which is where true intelligence comes in.”

Comfortably seated amid the old-fashioned opulence of the Century Club, Danforth looked very much the worldly intelligence officer who’d once sipped cognac and smoked cigars with the sort of characters one might find in Graham Greene or Somerset Maugham. His suit had passed its prime, and his tie was unstylishly wide, but I could imagine him as a figure from a bygone age, a handsome young man in a white dinner jacket, lounging on some tropical veranda, watching a steamer move out of the harbor. There would be riotously colored birds in the long green fronds of the nearby trees, and on that ship, a woman in a satin dress would be standing with a champagne glass in her long white fingers, lifting it to him silently, Adieu, mon amour. He was part of a vanished time, I thought, a lost world, and because of that, my current mission seemed even more a matter of giving the new boy something to do.

“You’re an Ivy Leaguer,” Danforth said. “Columbia.” His gaze softened, and I saw the wound we shared. “A fellow New Yorker.”

A familiar wave of kill-them-all rage passed over me at the barbarity that had been inflicted upon what had always seemed the most American of cities, but I tamped it down with a crisp “Yes.”

Even so, it was clear that Danforth had seen the flame that briefly lit my eyes.

“Hatred is a very legitimate emotion,” he said. “Believe me, I’ve known it well, and certainly at this moment we have a right to our ire.”

This was a different position from the self-loathing justifications for the attack that had lately wafted up from various quarters, and I was relieved to hear it.

“Anyway,” Danforth said, “I’m sure the best think tanks are bloated with boys like you.”

I didn’t like the term bloated but nodded anyway, now a little impatient to get on with the interview, write up my report, and head back to Washington. “So?” I said hastily. “Shall we go on?”

Danforth noted my impatience. “You are a very focused young man.” His expression was quite gentle, perhaps even a bit indulgent. I might almost have called it Socratic.

“Crane,” he said. “An English name.”

“Yes, but I’m really of German stock,” I answered. “At least, for the most part.”

“So a name must have been changed along the way,” Danforth said. “What was it before?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “My grandfather changed it during the war.” I offered a quick smile. “I suppose he didn’t want to be blamed for things he hadn’t done.”

Danforth nodded. “Quite understandable. No one would have wanted to be accused of things like that.”

“And which he couldn’t have done because he left Germany before the war,” I added.

Danforth smiled. “Do you speak German?”

“Not since high school.”

“That’s a pity,” Danforth said. “Certain words in that language often come to mind. Rache, for example. It has a rough sound, don’t you think? Kind of a snarl. It sounds like what it means: ‘vengeance.’ But others don’t sound anything like what they mean, of course. For example, Verrat doesn’t sound like what it means at all.”

“What does Verrat mean?”

“‘Betrayal.’”

Before I could respond to this, Danforth turned toward the window, beyond which a gentle snow was falling. “There was a lot of fear after the Crash of Twenty-nine,” he said. “People were desperate.” His gaze turned searching. “I’m sure you’ve read about it in your history books.”

“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 viscosity 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 reminded 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 it 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 Danforth 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 Danforth 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 uptown, 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 family business. The 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 un-enlightening 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 office, 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 unraveling.

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. Danforth 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 offices 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.

He walked back toward a table he’d selected almost the instant he’d come into the bar, in much the same way a hunted man might locate the nearest exit. He knew that there was something primitive in this, something not altogether rational, something he thought might serve a soldier better than an importer. For that reason, he’d found a secret anticipation in the rattling rumors of European war, even an obscene but reflexive hope that they might prove true. It was the hope of a young man, he knew, and a foolish one at that. The two uncles buried in the American cemetery at Romagne reminded him that war could prove fatal, so any time he allowed himself to anticipate it with anything but dread, he also made himself recall the long rows of white crosses he’d seen in that sweeping burial ground. But even in this memory, a glimmer of war’s romance managed to peek through: he also recalled the visitors’ book at Romagne, how in so many distinctly different hands, the French had written the simple, elegant merci.

A barmaid swam out of the gloom a few minutes after he took his seat, a woman clearly recruited from the kitchen staff. The greasy apron proved that, along with the damp washcloth that hung around her neck.

“What can I get you?” she asked.

The Old Town Bar was no place for a dry martini.

“Scotch,” Danforth said. “Straight up.”

While he waited, Danforth went over the day’s usual business problems: delays in shipments, boats waylaid by storms, and always, always, overland disruptions in Manchuria. In the Orient, the actual nature of the obstacle was rarely clear, but then what did it matter if a mountain pass was blocked by a blizzard or by the thievish whim of some local warlord? In the importing business, his father had taught him, one learned to accept the inscrutable. There was no other enterprise on earth, according to the elder Danforth, that more fully and continually confronted hazard: shipments inundated by swollen rivers or buried in avalanches, trains seized by starving mobs or expropriated by revolutionaries, and if the merchandise did not fall victim to any of these, then it was held captive by greedy functionaries intent on expanding bribery’s already more than generous largesse. Importation operated like the universe, as Danforth had come to see it: irrationally and violently, with something vaguely criminal at its core.

The bar door burst open and Clayton came through it, stopped, stomped the snow from his shoes, then peered about expectantly.

Danforth lifted his hand.

Clayton nodded briskly and headed toward him, rubbing his glasses with a white handkerchief. He’d returned them to his face by the time he reached the table.

“It’s like the Blizzard of Eighty-three out there,” he said.

Clayton worked as a photography archivist for the library on Forty-second Street, a job secured for him, no doubt, by the large annual contribution his family made to the library. He specialized in New York City history; his head was filled with black-and-white images of its storied past. Danforth knew with certainty that at the mention of the 1883 blizzard, Clayton’s mind had instantly offered up striking pictures of that peculiar disaster: a city locked in great drifts of ghostly pale; horses buried in harness, their heads protruding from white mounds, stiff as bookends.

“Have you been here long?” Clayton asked.

“Only a few minutes.”

He pulled off his coat and draped it over an empty chair but left his red scarf around his neck and shoulders. “This place seems quite cozy, don’t you think?”

The barmaid lumbered over. Clayton ordered a vodka tonic with lime.

“So,” he said once it was just the two of them again, “how are things in imports?”

“A family business is a family business,” Danforth answered. “I liked the training better than the mission.”

“Imagine how bored you’ll be at thirty,” Clayton said with a quick smile.

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 kümmel 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.”

~ * ~