On Green Dolphin Street Read Online Free PDF

in him yearned protectively toward them. In the sober daylight, however, he found they were expensive, wearisome and always complicating the arrangements. Before, he had been true to some ideal he had developed of the way a man should live, without favor or obligation to anyone but himself; now he was preparing to persuade some adviser on the Nixon payroll that there was a coincidence of interest in the way they saw the Communist threat. Charlie had once been good at this kind of thing; his social ease and humor, coupled with degrees and honors he had acquired with the minimum of endeavor at ancient English and American universities, had fitted him in the eyes of his superiors for rapid advancement; they remained unaware of his difficulties, and his occasionally erratic behavior was overlooked in the generally hedonistic atmosphere or accepted as the price of his talents.
    After the meeting, he took a taxi to the hotel where his temporaryoffice was on the first floor of the building. It was a converted bedroom suite, in the outer room of which, the former lounge, sat his secretary, a tidy American woman in a gray flannel skirt and black loafers.
    “Coffee, Mr. van der Linden?”
    “Thank you, Benton.” He called her what everyone else did; no one seemed to think that Patty, her first name, did justice to her severe efficiency.
    “I read the Russians are going to put a man in space,” she said as she placed the cup on his desk.
    “Really? Make me some appointments, Benton, get me busy. By lunchtime I don’t want to be free to travel.”
    “Right away, Mr. van der Linden. Any news about when we’ll be moving into the new Embassy?”
    “Can’t tell you that, Benton. Classified.”
    Benton’s first job had been working with the British military in Washington in the last year of the war, which had given her security clearance at a level exceptional for a nonnative in the Embassy. Charlie liked to pretend that this had been a serious mistake.
    Benton paused with her hand on the telephone. “By the way,” she said, “did you hear they invented a new cocktail? It’s called the Sputnik.”
    “Okay, what is it?”
    “One part vodka and three parts sour grapes.”
    “I like it. I’m surprised at a good American like you, though, telling such unpatriotic jokes. You might find yourself the subject of a hearing.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “I heard one, too,” said Charlie. “You know Eisenhower likes to read science fiction. What does Khrushchev read?”
    “I already heard that one,” said Benton, as she settled at the desk and began to dial. “Science fact.”
    Charlie gazed out at the frosted sycamore trees on the avenue. The people of the United States appeared to be in a condition of what his psychoanalyst in Bethesda called “free-floating anxiety,” expecting, for all their material comforts, to be overwhelmed at any moment by the superiortechnical weaponry of the Russian enemy or undermined from within by the machinations of its agents. They appeared to be losing the Cold War, and were always aware of that awkward fact. He knew one American family who had relocated to Montana to be beyond the range of Soviet missiles, but most seemed to have reached a compromise with their anxieties: to still the beating heart, they went hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains, they experimented with European wines, they planned holidays with friends and affairs with the same friends’ spouses, they listened to show tunes and jazz, they bought larger cars with bigger tail fins. They opened charge accounts, bought new seasonal wardrobes and indulged their children in Hula Hoops and Lincoln Logs.
    Charlie sighed and picked up the unopened mail on his desk. His stomach lining felt as though it had been scoured with wire wool.
    Frank Renzo did not come downstairs until eleven o’clock. He found Mary on the telephone in the kitchen, explaining to Kelly Eberstadt that she might be late for their lunch appointment because of her sleeping