The Accident Read Free Page B

squared-off, in the breast pocket of his suitjacket. He’s surprised at how many of those decisions made back then, at a time when adulthood seemed to stretch ahead indefinitely, turned out to be untemporary. Careers and hobbies, spouses or lack thereof, political beliefs and literary preferences, hairstyles and pocket squares.
    The sun is streaming through the French doors, casting brilliant white light across the whitewashed floors, the white brick walls, the white upholstery, the occasional piece of unavoidable Danish teak. In the kitchen it’s even brighter because of the reflections from the appliances. The brightness is almost blinding.
    The elaborately carved front door is covered in hundreds of years’ worth of uncountable coats of paint, scraped and chipped and deeply gouged, revealing an undercoat of pale green here, a dark blue there. He removes a matchbook from his pocket, tears out a paper match, inserts it between door and jamb, one match-length above a long gash in the wood.
    The street is leafy, sun-dappled, birdsongy. Hayden’s bicycle leans amid dozens of others in the jumbled rack on the wide sidewalk, a few blocks from the queen’s palace in Amalienborg. He hops on, pedals gently through quiet streets, to the staid brick building on Kronprinsessegade that houses the David Collection, one of the premier resources on the Continent for his new hobby, Islamic art. He spends a half-hour examining the Middle Age artifacts of the Spanish emirate, from a time when Cordoba was the largest city in Western Europe. Cordoba, of all places.
    Hayden Gray is, after all, a cultural attaché. He has a large luxurious office three hundred miles to the south, in the American Embassy in Pariser Platz, next to the Brandenburg Gate. He still makes his permanent home in Munich, but his new job responsibilities require regular appearances in Berlin, and a legitimate office there. Of course Berlin has always been a fascination for Hayden, indeed for anyone in his line of work. Los Angeles has the film business, and Paris has fashion; Berlin is for espionage. But it’s not a particularly attractive city, and the appealing things about it—a vibrant youth culture, a practically developing-worldlevel of inexpensiveness, and the limitless energy of its nightlife—are not compelling assets for him. So he’d rather not live there.
    Back on the bicycle, alongside the lush greenery of the King’s Garden, across the bridge, and into Nørrebro, the midday street life a mixture of young native artistic types and recent immigrants, alternative bars alongside kebab joints that double as social clubs. He locks the bike just as the rain begins, quick spatters and then within seconds full-on.
    Hayden rushes to push the glossy door, climbs a long steep flight of stairs, and enters an apartment, high-ceilinged and large-windowed, but shabby, and nearly empty. The place where he’s been sleeping for the past couple of nights is a long-term lease—a quarter-century long, in fact—on the other side of downtown Copenhagen. But this one on Nørrebrogade was hastily arranged a week ago by the woman who’s sitting at the window now, a pair of binoculars in her hands.
    “Hello,” she says, without turning. She can see him in the window’s reflection.
    “Anything?”
    “No. Bore. Dom.”
    Hayden joins her at the window, looks past the immense streetlight suspended by wires above the boulevard, across to the storefront on the ground level, to the apartment above it.
    She gives him the once-over. “Nice tie,” she says. “You have anything interesting for me today?”
    “ Al ways. Let’s see … Ah, here’s a good one: Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on the same day.”
    “You mean the same date?”
    “I mean they died on the same exact day . And that day was July Fourth. In 1826.”
    She turns to him. “That’s not true.”
    “Oh, but it is.”
    “Huh. I give that a 9.”
    “What do I need to get a 10?”
    “I’ll know