But first. You had to appreciate the sight that stretched before you, as you used your private key to open up the battered metal door on the nineteenth floor marked FURNITURE REPOSITORY. I know I did. Rows and rows of wooden filing cabinets, covered with the thinnest layer of dust, just for atmosphere. The single bare bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling, looking as if Edison himself had installed it. That dark and musty flavor of the same million-billion particles of air rubbing against one another for weeks on end. I sighed it all in and out. The splendors of the world lay in wait.
It occurred to me, as I made my way to the first filing cabinet, as I touched it with my index finger as I might touch the Ark of the Covenant, that Lightfoot hadn’t imposed any conditions on my visit here. No vow of secrecy, no injunction on copying or removing or destroying as I saw fit. Maybe all that was implicit in the granting of the key itself. I was the inner circle now; I was the archives. You did not befoul your own bed.
I rolled open the first drawer. Secret the archives might be, but they were arranged impeccably by date and office, in crisp manila folders rarely exposed to the horrors of oxidation. I pulled out the first, just for the sake of curiosity. Paris office, 1888. From the Baroness Pauline Marie Plessis de Meaux to Mr. S. Barnard Lightfoot, written in French, deeply apologetic that she had not written since last month, but she had been très, très occupée with the redecoration of her salon, and the races at Deauville had been divine, divine, and please would he remember that these little notices were to be kept strictly confidential? Her dear husband would not be pleased, and perhaps not her friends, either.
As I said. The splendors of the world.
Still. Work to be done. I put the baroness back where she belonged and dragged my greedy fingers along the cabinets until I came to the year 1914, which in fact filled two separate filing cabinets, so great was the flood of information pouring into S. Barnard Lightfoot Jr.’s mailbox in that tumultuous year. (Lightfoot père had died happily of asphyxiation between his mistress’s breasts in the summer of 1905, as everyone knew.) I flipped past tantalizing folders for Paris, Rome, London, Shanghai, Tokyo, and finally came upon one marked BERLIN, JAN–MAR.
I drew it out.
Now. Here’s the trouble turning a curious animal like me loose in an archive like this, with no clear idea what I was looking for, and no clue where it might be. I picked up the first item—a cablegram, as it happened—and while I meant simply to scan the thing over for the names Violet, Walter, Grant, or Lionel, I was immediately sucked into contemplation of the word fellatio. And my goodness! What a parade of scandal could be contained in a single cablegram! Who was this Lolo, and why would she (or, equally, he) risk all with the photographic evidence the Metropolitan’s Berlin correspondent evidently now had in hand?
NO SMOKING read a small brass sign above the reading table, where I carried my chosen files. Normally, I enjoyed a good smoke as I browsed through a comfortable stack of scandal of an afternoon, but this time I didn’t notice the absence, because the Berlin of 1914 was my kind of town.
Spent all night at the Bluebird, spilled out at dawn (and I do mean spilled), wrote the correspondent on March 11. Witnessed at least three acts of adultery between midnight and three, and heard from my dear General X that the Kaiser and Kaiserin are quarreling again. Plus ?a change. The cabaret was excellent. Lolo as Dido, or perhaps Dido as Lolo: one can no longer distinguish between history and reality after the absinthe goes in the punch.
Then in April: The anarchists have taken over my favorite café on Unter den Linden this week, and we are forced to abandon our post for the less hospitable reaches of the Café des Westerns, sweating, sick, and hot as Brooke had it. Oh, damn, I know it!
By now, the small of my back was aching, and so were my eyes: the Metropolitan’s Berlin correspondent appeared to have written most of his letters while drunk on absinthe or something else, not that I could blame him. I rose from my chair, stretched, and reached for my pocketbook.
The windows of the archive were concealed by thick yellowing blinds and stuck shut by strata of old paint, but I persevered until a few inches of chilled October air could be coaxed from the bottom sash and into the room, laced with automobile exhaust and the arrhythmic staccato of taxi horns. Pace brass-plated prohibitions, I lit a cigarette and watched the traffic crawl below, the hatted hoards stream along the pavement in their dozens. Lunchtime.
What was Doctor Paul having for lunch today? Something quick and cheap from the hospital automat? A sandwich from home? Or was he too busy for lunch at all?
I thought, I could still turn back. I could walk out of this room and lock the door up tight, and I could swish down the elevator and out into the bristling New York sidewalk. I could rattle down the IRT to Saint Vincent’s Hospital and ask for Dr. David Paul Salisbury and tell him I’d made a terrible mistake, I couldn’t live without him, could we start over and forget Gogo, forget Violet and Lionel, forget the whole damned world, because the problems of two people didn’t amount to a hill of beans in this . . .