Chapter Two A Matter of Life and Death
In which a promise costs more than he expected, and a stolen paper costs more still
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They were surrounded within seconds by a knot of onlookers, and somewhere in the tangle of it all a patrolman's whistle was already shrilling. The cab driver sat frozen at the wheel, both hands still gripping it as though the accident had happened to someone else entirely.
A small, barefoot figure lay crumpled at the curb, and as the crowd pressed closer Graham caught the ugly murmur running through it — a boy's voice, sharp with the particular cruelty of the very young: "Look at him just sittin' there. Rich fellas like him, they don't care who they run down."
A cold horror moved through Graham's chest. The cab had struck a newsboy — struck him hard enough that the boy lay still, papers scattered white across the wet pavement like fallen snow.
And instantly, cruelly, the Director's voice rose up in his memory. Don't let anything hinder you. Make it a matter of life and death. Well — here, God help him, was a matter of life and death that had planted itself directly in his path.
They lifted the moaning child into the cab, and Graham, finding no way through the crowd that did not look like flight, climbed in beside him.
A policeman swung up front with the driver, and they started for the hospital with the Director's words still turning over and over in Graham's mind until he thought he might lose his reason entirely.
Don't let anything hinder you. He thought, with a bitterness that surprised him, of turning back — but the vision of himself explaining to a magistrate why he had abandoned an injured child in the street held him fast to his seat.
He was ashamed, in the middle of his fear for his mission, to notice that his own irritation ran alongside his horror — irritation at the delay, at the dog that had started this whole miserable chain of misfortune, at a world that seemed determined tonight to test him past what he thought he could bear.
Then the boy's eyes fluttered open, and Graham went very still.
There was something in them — something soft and wounded and entirely without guile — that struck him with the force of recognition.
He had seen that same look not four hours before, in the eyes of a stray white dog on a New Jersey embankment.
"Will you stay by me," the boy whispered, "till I'm fixed up?"
Something in Graham's chest twisted painfully.
He thought of the Director's gray eyes, of the folder, of the whole enormous weight of the evening still ahead of him — and he thought too, unbidden, of a verse he had not consciously called to mind in years.
Matthew 25:40 — "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
" It came to him now with a force that felt almost like accusation, and he did not know, in that moment, whether it condemned him for what he was about to do or comforted him for what he could not help.
"Listen, son," he said gently, leaning close to the boy's grimy, frightened face. "I'd stay with you if I could — I would, and gladly. But I've got a duty tonight I can't turn aside from, one that isn't only mine to give up. Do you understand what duty is?"
The boy's chin trembled, but he nodded with a gravity that seemed far older than his years.
"Sure," he murmured. "Don't you mind about me. I'm game." And then his eyes closed again, and the small, grimy face went slack with unconsciousness.
Graham went into the hospital only long enough to press a fold of bills into the hand of the admitting nurse, along with his word that he would return within the week to see how the boy fared.
Then he hurried back out into the cold, carrying with him a weight that had nothing to do with the cipher folder in his coat.
I have done to him as little as I dared, he thought, climbing back into the waiting cab, and I do not know if it was enough.
He closed his eyes and tried to compose himself, but the boy's small face kept rising before him, and close behind it, unwelcome, the imagined curl of Judy Bristol's mouth — the particular scorn she would have shown at a man who let a street child delay him on business of consequence.
What else could I have done? he asked himself, almost angrily — and found, to his own surprise, that he no longer much cared what Judy Bristol would have thought of it.
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At the Cosmopolitan at last, and in the act of signing "John Burnham" to the hotel register in a hand he hoped did not betray him, Graham was summoned to the house phone.
His fingers were not quite steady as he lifted the receiver.
"Yes — hello? Oh, Mrs. Halifax. Yes, this is Burnham.
I've only just arrived, I'm afraid — there was a derailment ahead of the train, and then a rather unavoidable delay in the city.
Very kind of you to have me. I'll be along directly, as soon as I've shaken off the dust of the road. Thank you — good evening."
It sounded, to the desk clerk stamping bills nearby and fretting over whether he'd make his own date at the picture show, like nothing more than the ordinary business of an ordinary traveler.
But Graham set down the receiver and glanced about him as though he expected to find agents of some hostile power waiting behind every potted palm in the lobby.
It was the first time in his short career he had operated under a false name, and it felt, absurdly, as though the name Burnham were printed in letters six feet high across his forehead for the whole city to read.
He made quick work of dressing — Whitfield's packing proved, as promised, faultless — and was nearly out the door when a bellhop caught him with a telegram.
It was from the Director, worded in language that would have read, to any ordinary telegraph operator, as an urgent recall to Boston.
To Graham's trained eye it was nothing of the kind — only a piece of careful misdirection, laid down in case anyone should think to trace his movements.
He found himself almost smiling at the old man's thoroughness, at a mind that seemed to have accounted for every possible danger before Graham himself had even conceived of it.
If only, he thought, climbing into yet another cab, I could trust so completely in a Father I cannot see, the way I've learned to trust a chief I can.
The thought startled him with its own honesty, and he turned it over in his mind the whole short ride to the station, where he checked his suitcase, and on to the quiet, handsome street where the Halifax residence stood lit up gold and welcoming against the dark.
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The company was assembled and waiting when he arrived, and after a round of introductions that passed by him in a blur of names and handshakes, they went in at once to dinner.
Graham took his seat feeling that he had already bungled the whole enterprise past saving — that he had arrived too late, too rattled, too haunted by a boy's white face to be of any use to the Director who had trusted him with this.
For the first several minutes the brilliant lights of the dining room and the murmur of unfamiliar voices washed over him without resolving into anything he could grasp. He caught himself starting, once, at the sound of his own false name.
But gradually, under the gentle, unhurried kindness of his hostess — a pale, soft-spoken woman whose manners seemed almost too delicate for the room she presided over — Graham felt his pulse begin to steady.
He thought of the Director's keen eyes, somewhere back in Washington, waiting to learn whether his judgment in choosing this untried young man had been sound, and something in him rose to meet the thought.
Whatever else happens tonight, he told himself, I will not disgrace the trust that's been placed in me.
Slowly the blur of faces around the table resolved itself into particular men, and Graham began, with the same instinct that had served him well in two years of careful work, to read them.
There was Halifax himself — broad, ruddy, hearty in the way of a man who had built a fortune on other men's misfortune and had long since made his peace with it.
There was his wife, gentle and a little sad-eyed, seeming almost a stranger in her own dining room.
There were two other men of evident wealth and polish, whose easy laughter did not quite reach their watching eyes; and three lesser men — one young and sleek, one old and worn about the edges, one thick-set and silent — who spoke only when spoken to and seemed, Graham thought, more like hired men than honored guests.
He felt it before he could have named it: some unspoken understanding running around the table, a readiness among them to close ranks the instant danger showed itself. He would have to walk very carefully indeed.
"Weren't you telling me you'd been in some kind of accident on the way?" Mrs. Halifax asked suddenly, turning her mild eyes on him, and the table's chatter stilled at once.
"A wreck!" Halifax himself leaned forward. "Not serious, I hope?"
Graham caught his misstep at once and smiled easily to cover it.
"Nothing to speak of — a freight derailed ahead of us on the line, that's all, and a bit of a delay getting free of it.
Reminds me, actually—" and he was off into one of the easy dinner stories he'd always been known for among his Navy friends, turning the table's attention neatly away from questions about trains and schedules and points of origin that he had no wish to answer.
By the time the story had run its course, the whole table was laughing, and Graham felt, for the first time that evening, something like his own footing return beneath him.
The soup gave way to fish, the fish to the entrée, and Graham had very nearly begun to relax into the rhythm of ordinary conversation when Halifax leaned back in his chair with the satisfied air of a man about to collect on an old debt.