Quest for Anna Klein, The Read Free Page B

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.
    â€œAll right, I looked,” Danforth said.
    â€œAnd saw a man, right? Leaning against the corner building.”
    â€œYes,” Danforth said warily. “How did you know?”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œI 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
    â€œSo, 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.”
    â€œA 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.
    â€œHe 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 thatlittle trick with the man on the corner was all about. It was like a scent he released in the air.”
    â€œA scent of what?”
    â€œMystery, 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.”
    â€œDid 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 rippedfrom the old bonds of steady work