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.