Chapter One The Thirty-Two-Minute Summons #2
He had known Judy three years now. She was, by any fair account, a beautiful woman — dark-eyed, quick-tongued, the kind of woman who made an entrance simply by walking into a room and letting the room notice her.
Her family had money, her father had influence, and Judy herself had never once, in three years, given Graham the smallest reason to doubt that she considered their eventual marriage a settled matter, requiring only his cooperation on the timing.
He had a note from her in his coat pocket even now — pale lavender paper, her tall slanted hand — reminding him he'd promised to escort her to the Ambassador's reception that very evening.
He'd wired his regrets from the station, a curt line about being called away on business, and he wondered now, watching the brown fields blur past the window, whether he felt more relief or more guilt at having an excuse.
Was that itself not an answer, he thought, of a kind?
He tried, out of some stubborn loyalty to the shape of the evening he'd meant to have, to imagine Judy beside him now — to picture her comments on the magazine article he'd bought and wasn't reading, the particular curl of her mouth when she disagreed with a heroine's choices in some serialized romance.
He knew exactly what she would say. He always did.
That, he thought, was rather the trouble with it — there was no surprise left in Judy Bristol, only a smooth, well-worn path he could walk with his eyes closed, straight into a marriage he was no longer at all certain he wanted.
Were all marriages like that, he wondered, once the shine wore off — two people simply enduring each other's rough edges and calling it love because they lacked the courage to call it anything truer? Or was he only tired, and cynical, and in need of something he could not yet name?
He shook the thought off with some irritation at himself and went to see why the train had begun, inexplicably, to slow.
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They were just beyond Princeton Junction, the conductor informed a car full of grumbling businessmen, when a freight had derailed somewhere up the line. No one could say how long the delay might run — an hour, perhaps two, depending on how quickly the wrecking crew could clear the tracks.
Graham stood on the cinder embankment beside the stalled train, hands in his coat pockets, watching the gray November sky and doing sums in his head.
If the delay ran long, he would arrive in the city with barely time to dress, let alone to think through his approach to a dinner table full of strangers and a stolen government cipher.
Don't let anything hinder you. The Director's voice, low and exact, ran through his memory like a hand closing round his collar.
It was in this frame of mind — irritable, watchful, faintly afraid — that a large, shaggy white dog came limping up out of the weeds along the track bed and pressed its head, without the least invitation, against Graham's leg.
He looked down, startled out of his brooding, into a pair of soft, entirely unembarrassed brown eyes.
"Well," he said aloud, surprising himself, "and where did you spring from?"
The dog — some rough-coated mix of collie and something larger, with burrs matted in its white fur and ribs that showed a little too plainly beneath — leaned its whole weight companionably against his knee, and Graham, against every instinct of good sense, found himself crouching down to scratch behind its ears.
There was something in the animal's frank, undemanding affection that eased, for one strange moment, the tight coil of nerves he'd been carrying since the Director's office.
He thought — half-amused at his own foolishness — of another verse, one his mother was fonder of.
Psalm 84:3 — "Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O LORD of hosts, my King, and my God.
" He couldn't think why a stray dog on a Jersey embankment should call it to mind, except that the world, for one breath, felt less like a thing he had to manage alone.
Then the conductor's whistle blew, sharp and sudden, and Graham straightened, patted the dog once more, and hurried for the steps of his car — only to find, settling into his seat not ninety seconds later, that the dog had followed him aboard and was now cheerfully, muddily draping itself across his good gray trousers.
"Sir." The conductor had appeared in the aisle, unamused. "No animals in the parlor car."
"I entirely agree with the rule," Graham said, with feeling, attempting without success to disentangle himself from an armful of enthusiastic dog. "I don't suppose you'd care to enforce it?"
"He belong to you?"
"I never laid eyes on him before ten minutes ago. He appears, however, to have formed an attachment."
The conductor's mouth twitched, very slightly, at one corner. "Baggage car," he said, and jerked his head toward the rear of the train, in the tone of a man who had seen everything a railroad could show him and was no longer much surprised by any of it.
There seemed nothing else for it. Graham walked the length of two swaying cars with a hundred pounds of unwanted white dog leaning affectionately against his leg the entire way, deposited him with the baggage master, and returned to his seat with as much dignity as he could gather, aware of several amused glances from his fellow passengers — the very inconspicuousness his mission required already, within the first hours of it, badly compromised.
Of all the days, he thought, half laughing at himself despite his irritation, for a stray to choose me.
?
At Newark, hoping to be rid of the creature for good, he discovered the baggage master had been quietly counting on his return, and handed the dog over with a look of such transparent relief that Graham nearly laughed aloud despite his mounting worry over the hour.
What followed was three-quarters of an hour of increasingly frantic errand-running through unfamiliar streets — a boarding kennel that wanted references he didn't have, a veterinary office that had already closed for the evening, a policeman who eyed him with open suspicion when he tried, too hastily, to explain why a well-dressed young man was attempting to abandon a large white dog on a stranger's doorstep.
It was near six o'clock, with the last gray light going out of the sky over the Hudson, before a kindly cab driver directed him to a boarding establishment that would, for the outrageous sum of ten dollars, take the animal in for a week.
Graham paid it without argument, scratched the dog's ears one final time — the creature gazing up at him with an expression of such wounded, trusting devotion that he felt an entirely unreasonable pang of guilt — and climbed back into his waiting cab with his pocket watch already out.
Twenty minutes. If nothing else went wrong, he would have just twenty minutes to reach the Cosmopolitan, dress, and compose himself for a dinner upon which — he did not need the Director to remind him again — a great deal more than his own career might depend.
He thought, briefly, of Judy Bristol, and of how she would have handled the last three hours — with icy, wounded patience, no doubt, the kind that punished a man for a week afterward without ever once raising her voice.
And then, unbidden and a good deal more pleasantly, he thought of the dog's honest brown eyes, and found himself smiling out at the darkening streets despite everything.
Lord, he thought — and this time did not stop himself, did not call it sentiment and put it away — whatever's waiting for me tonight, I could use Your steadying hand on it. I haven't asked You for much in a good while. I'm asking now.
God heard his prayer. Little did Caleb Graham know of the journey that lay before him. Isaiah 65:24 — “And it shall come to pass, that before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear.”
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The cab swung hard around a corner three blocks short of the hotel, tires shrieking faintly against the wet pavement — and came to so sudden and violent a stop that Graham was thrown clean off the seat and onto his knees on the cab's floor, his hat rolling into the gutter of his own racing thoughts, and the whole carefully laid evening, in one jarring instant, thrown into a darkness he could not yet see the shape of.