He looked at her from across the city newsroom. Andrea was seated at her desk, leaning back in her chair. A man two decades older than she, a professorial-looking man who'd gracefully entered his later years, sat on the edge of her desk and engaged her in a subdued but intense conversation. Even before they saw him, Thomas Daniels knew who the man was. He had a sense of intruding.
"Thomas" she said with animation when she spotted him. She leaned forw'and quickly, then stood.
"You're just who we were talking about ' She embraced him fondly.
"I'm sure you were," he said flatly.
The older man was on his feet now. He was standing uncomfortably, waiting to be introduced.
"This is Augie Reid," she said.
"He covers Albany and the idiots in the state legislature for us ' "I know," Thomas said.
"I've seen the by-line' The two men extended their hands in a chilly, if nonetheless civil, greeting.
"Don't let me interrupt anything" Thomas said, perfectly pleased that he had interrupted.
"If you're having an intimate chat, newspaper work or otherwise, I could come back' "Not a chance" Andrea said, leaning over and pulling a chair from a neighboring desk.
"Sit." A woman with an insatiable appetite for gossip or argument, she wanted to see the two men faced with each other. Thomas knew it.
"I was just leaving, anyway," offered Reid politely. His pipe went from his left hand back to his mouth. A thin stream of smoke drifted upward.
"Maybe all three of us should talk," Andrea suggested. Thomas looked at Reid with thinly veiled displeasure. Reid shook his head mildly to Andrea.
Thomas. sat and threw a jaundiced eye upward toward Reid.
"Do we have something to talk about?" he asked.
"Oh, I doubt it'" offered Reid amiably.
"Maybe your father."
Daniels was quick to frown and pursue the point.
"What?" he asked, a suggestion of anger in his tone. Everywhere, everywhere, William Ward Daniels.
Reid offered a smile.
"Met him once" said Reid, teeth clenched on the pipe. -The man impressed me. Only reason I mention it is my older brother knew him well" Reid perceived that Thomas was annoyed at something.
"No offense intended' he said.
"None taken," said Thomas slowly.
"When did your brother know him?" The question was cautious, exploring the territory.
"City College," said Reid. Thomas could see that the reporter was studying him as he spoke. Daniels disliked people who seemed to look through him when conversing. He'd seen too many of them.
"They were classmates together. Prelaw"Another puff of smoke was launched toward the ceiling.
"Knew each other very well there, in fact. Debating team. Political Science Union. Chess Club. My brother," added Reid, changing pace just slightly, 'he died about two years ago-' "I'm sorry."
Reid shrugged, as if this were the accepted course of things, and continued, 'my brother said that your father possessed the most overpowering intellect he'd ever met" Thomas shrugged in non commitment He'd heard it all before, too many times.
"Only one thing puzzled him. Mind if I tell you?"
Andrea took in the exchange greedily. She loved it. Reid waited for a response and when Thomas acquiesced in silence, Reid continued.
"City College back in the thirties," the reporter said.
"well, I'm old enough to remember a bit of that myself. Great ideologists.
Reaction from the Depression. Reaction to capitalism. Know what I'm going to say?"
"No," said Thomas. He didn't. But he was hooked. He watched another puff of smoke rise. The reporter knew how to draw someone into a story. Reid held the pipe in his hand.
"All the great intellects were left wing" he said. shaking his head, he added,
"Understandable. That's where the intellectuals were.
With the great Russian Experiment,as they called it. They hadn't had to excuse the Stalin purge trials yet. But that's aside from the point. The point is, my brother was always puzzled by your father.
He was the intellect of his class. The intellect. And he went the other road completely. The other wing. And all that jingoistic nonsense."
Thomas shrugged slightly as if to ask what that proved.
"Well said Reid, recovering slightly, "human beings do things for reasons. Other human beings try to figure out why. How could your father have come out of that same environment and been so different politically?"
"I have no idea" said Thomas flatly.
"Ever wondered'?"
"No" he admitted.
Um 'hummed Reid.
"People are people, I suppose." He was thoughtful.
"He flirted with socialism for a while, my brother used to tell me.
Sold socialism to other freshmen, then dropped it himself "Who?"
"Your father," said Reid with a slight smile.
"For a few months as a freshman. You act surprised."
"I am" Reid offered a pensive and perplexed expression as if to say,
"What does it mean? I don't know." He said in closing,
"Well, guess it doesn't mean much now. See you again sometime ' He offered his hand. Thomas took it without resenting it. He didn't dislike Reid as much as he'd wanted to. For some vague reason, he didn't dislike him at all.
Reid nodded to Thomas and Andrea, made an awkward half move – as if starting to lean forward to kiss her, then thinking better of it -then turned and left. Thomas sat by her desk in silence for a few moments watching him leave.
"They're getting older all the time, aren't they?" he asked.
"Who?"
"Your new beaux" he said.
"Aren't you afraid you might give him a heart attack?"
Her eyes narrowed and focused on him sharply.
"I could ask you to leave for a remark like that' "I'm sure you could.
We'll start again. How was your trip?
"Youe in the plural sense."
"Profitable' ' "Profitable?" he asked, exploring the use of the word.
"I enjoyed myself. I'm getting to know Augie very well Thomas shrugged.
"I have eyes. Why do you have to tell me?"
"Because this is partially for you' "For me? What is?"
"Augiel" she said, as if in revelation.
"And the Sandler case. It all fits together."
"Not for me it doesn't. The power of instant and devastating insight was not one of the traits my father passed on "A shame " she said.
"Perhaps that's true. So I'll explain. Augie's a political historian in addition to being a reporter. Political and social ' "So?"
"And his particular field of expertise, if you want to call it that, is intelligence services. Nineteen forties and fifties There was a pause as Thomas sat there unmollified but now interested.
"The fact is'" she continued, 'that he was an intelligence officer in the war." She smiled with a mixture of smugness and self-efficiency.
"I've been plying him with questions," she said.
"Questions beyond the routine ones."
"What are you talking about? The Sandler case?"
"Of course. Espionage systems" She nodded to the direction in which Reid had disappeared.
"That man is a walking compendium of the various intelligence systems.
He taught a course on it at Columbia in the early sixties, before interest in such things went out of vogue. But," she explained further and again that smile returned,
"I have ways of getting him to talk even more than he would to his class. A man will answer any question when his mood is properly arranged."
He looked at her with an attitude that bordered on disbelief An instinct for the jugular was one thing. But here was an instinct toward a more remote artery, the secret unspoken recesses of a man's memory. His father would have loved it.
"You're incredible," was all he could mutter.
"Is that all you see in him?"
She opened her hands as if to say maybe, maybe not.
"He's an attractive man in his own way. I enjoy his company. I enjoyed being away for a week with him. Pleasure with business, you could call it."
"There are a lot of things you could call it " "Call it anything you prefer," she said.
"I love this Sandler story.
You're breaking into a terrific story. I want to understand it piece by piece as you uncover it. I have to understand it." She raised her eyebrows.
"You promised it to me, remember? I promised to help you as much as I could. In return, the story's mine."
He nodded.
"That was the agreement."
"What brings you here today? It's Sunday."
"The Times files."
"What about them?"
"Can you get me access to them?"
She pondered it for a moment.
"Yes. Why?"
"I want to find out about an airplane crash in 1971," he said.
"Then I want to go farther back. I want to read everything in the newspaper files pertaining to two men."
"Who?" she asked.
"Sandler's one, obviously. Who's the other?"
He hesitated only slightly before answering.
"Who were we just discussing?" he asked.
"Why not?" she answered.
"Let's go."
The microfilm was both the easiest and the most logical place to begin.
Left by Andrea in the archive room of the rambling old building on Forty-third Street, Thomas wandered for several minutes among the rows after rows of catalogued and categorized files.
Occasionally, at random, he would open a drawer and superficially eye the contents. Obituaries of the remote and long-forgotten. Clippings and news stories of events, important and otherwise, which no living person could remember.
Then, for the time, he moved on to the microfilm room. He obtained a spool for June of 1971 and anxiously cranked it to the fourteenth of the month.
Then to the fifteenth.
He scanned page one. He saw nothing of the airplane crash which Leslie had mentioned. Nor was there anything on page two or three.
He scanned to the index and saw nothing there. Then, meticulously, he began again at page four, ready to read every headline on every item in that day's edition. At the bottom of page eight in a quarter-column story hidden in a corner, he saw it. CARACAS TO MIAMI FLIGHT MISSING, read the small headline. 39 ABOARD. Thirty-nine lives, relegated to page eight. The story gave virtually no details, nor any list of passengers.
Thomas moved quickly to the next day's edition.
There, this time on page twelve, he found a further elaboration.
The Avianca flight had crashed sixty minutes after takeoff, going down in clear weather into the Caribbean. The final sentence of the short article implied that sabotage had not been ruled out as a reason for the crash.
Thomas anxiously cranked the microfilm spool for the next edition's coverage. But there was none. Nor was there any further mention of the crash in any succeeding day's Times.
He sat there for several minutes trying to draw some implication from the way the story had evaporated from the newspaper. Then he returned the spool and prowled through a microfilm index and directory until he found what else he wanted.
The Miami Herald. For the same dates.
In the Miami newspaper the crash had made the front page, since several Florida residents were lost in the crash. On page two of the Herald of June 16, Thomas found what he'd been seeking all along.
A passenger list.
Anxiously he read down. It was alphabetical. He quickly skipped through to the middle. To the M's. Then he saw it.
McAdam, George F, Kilnwick, Surrey, England Of course, he thought to himself An English address instead of a Swiss one. He skipped to the end of the list -the last name in fact.
Leslie McAdam, or at least the young woman whom he knew as Leslie McAdam, was as good as her word. It read: Whiteside, Peter S." Oxford, Oxfordshire, England Thomas then scanned the list more carefully. He saw no other names he recognized. Nor were there any other British subjects on the flight.
Thomas removed the spool of microfilm and for several minutes sat before the viewer with the spool of microfilm in his hand. He said nothing and barely moved. Mentally he tried to sort details, to find a flaw in someone's version of the story. He'd met a credible George McAdam. And he'd met a Peter Whiteside who, if not genuine, had to be part of a hoax of staggering proportions.
And Leslie McAdam? The woman he had encountered in the charred skeleton of his office, the woman who'd raised goosebumps on the back of his neck when she'd related her story, the woman with the savage scars across her throat?
She, too, was credible. Every bit as credible as the other two. Yet at least one side was lying outright. Someone was dead, someone else was alive. And like the elusive Arthur Sandler himself, who was alive yet couldn't possibly be, each side was a ghostly contradiction of the other. In a world where everything had to be black and white, Thomas was dealing only with emissaries of the gray regions.
Thomas returned the spool of microfilm that he'd held in his hand. Then he proceeded to the biographical files. And from there, over that afternoon and the entire next day, he withdrew every available shred of material on two men.
Arthur Sandler. And Thomas's own father.
He hid himself at a remote table in an isolated corner of the archives.
He examined even the most infinitesimal details of two lives. He sought, above all, any crosscurrents he could detect, hidden, salient, or otherwise. He sought corresponding patterns to their lives, public or private.
He waited for some great truth or revelation to leap out at him, for something unseen to become abruptly visible, for something long overlooked to become suddenly and stunningly understood.
Instead, nothing. Only the ordinary.
Arthur Sandler, the industrialist. William Ward Daniels, the attorney. Linked together in only the most obvious manner, a client lawyer relationship.
Or was it?
On the third day, a Tuesday, Thomas returned to the Times archives. He searched for implications: He would examine not what he saw, but what he didn't see. And slowly, a small portion of the darkness lifted. 1954, frozen for eternity on microfilm. Thomas could remember the year. His eleventh birthday had been in October and he could remember the catch Willie Mays had made off Vic Wertz in the World Series.
Eleven years old. He recalled the family home in Westchester County.
Back then, William Ward Daniels was still a certifiable hero to his only son. So what that in that year Daniels, Senior, was defending a sleazy character named Vincent De Septio?
The boy never knew about it. Until now.
The name De Septio rang a distant bell for Thomas. Somewhere he'd seen the name before. Recently. Very recently. Within the search of the previous two days.
He began the paper chase again from the beginning. And he was well into the afternoon when he discovered where he'd first seen the name.
De Septio, had been a client in 1938, 1939, and 1940. Each time he'd. been arraigned on various charges involving currency violations. just as Sandler had been, thought Thomas as he reread the scant, un detailed mention of Vincent De Septio, a Runyonesque underworld character who, for his imitative talents with pen and voice, was known as Vinnie the Parrot. Thomas muttered to himself, wishing those extensive files which had been destroyed by arson could some way be reclaimed from their ashes. Who was De Septio? What could his father's files have told Thomas?
He pondered it for a moment. Then, quickly looking back to notes he'd made on the life of Arthur Sandler, he posed to himself another unanswerable question. Why, he wondered, did it happen that De Septio was a client at the same time as Sandler? What was the connection, if any, considering they were operating in the same realm of criminal activity?
Thomas returned to another file in the Times archives, his palms wet with anxiety now, and withdrew a meager file on a middle echelon crook named De Septio.
Once again, the file spoke through what it left unsaid.
A brief biographical sketch traced De Septio's birth to Palermo in 1920. He entered the United States with his parents two years later, settling in New York City in an ethnic enclave around Mulberry and Canal. By the late 1930s De Septio had earned himself a solid police record, yet, unlike that of many of his peers, nothing touching on physical violence. De Septio's art was that of the swindle or, by 1940, the skillfully forged check.
Everything was predictable enough, Thomas noted. Then after recurring legal trouble which threatened to set him on the gloomy side of prison walls, De Septio happened upon an attorney who could work miracles.
William Ward Daniels represented De Septio.
And William Ward Daniels somehow managed to get three separate indictments dismissed.
Dismissed not in court, Thomas noted with increasing incredulity. But by a special prosecutor. A man named McFedrics, the special prosecutor for espionage cases, the man before whom the F.B.I. agents had once dragged Sandler.
Then a gap. Nothing in the biography accounted for the years after 1941. No deportation order, no armed forces. Nothing.
Then De Septio surfaced in the 1950s. He'd been indicted. He'd gone to William Ward Daniels for help. And apparently he'd received it.
The year was 1954 and again De Septio had involved himself with bogus money. In the autumn of that year his case had gone to court. And, according to newspaper accounts of the day, William Ward Daniels had managed to stall the trial date into November.
Then something had happened, though the newspapers and chroniclers of the day were unable to tell exactly what.
On November eleventh, Armistice Day, court had not been in session. On the twelfth, the court had never convened. And on the thirteenth, Vincent De Septio's case was dismissed.
Thomas sat down slowly in a wooden chair in the archives and tried mightily to grapple with what he was reading. What he saw before him was clear, yet carried no explanation. It was self-explanatory, yet was wide open to so many potential interpretations. And both stories, the De Septio story and the Sandler story, had been almost side by side within the same day's newspaper. November 12, 1954. But with no apparent link.
On that crisp day in November, some twenty-one years before Thomas Daniels sat in a grim quiet newspaper archive piecing together forgotten events, a man thought to be Arthur Sandler -who, like De Septio had been a counterfeiter in his day-had been gunned down on a fashionable Manhattan side street.
On the day thereafter, De Septio had been issued from Washington, D.C. a pardon exonerating him from all crimes past and present, thus ending his problems with the local Assistant U.S. Attorney.
And even more cryptic, noted Thomas Daniels, was what followed.
Nothing. A gap which "tended to the present.
After the thirteenth of November, 1954, Vincent De Septio was never seen or heard from again.
Without question, the Vincent De Septio affair was the major case before Zenger and Daniels that year, perhaps their most important case in the 1950s. But Thomas would never have drawn the De Septio connection-at all had it not been for one word, one forever-unproven charge which drifted like a phantom through the accounts of the case.
Counterfeiting.