As noted last week, some of the most exciting and stylish new restaurants in New York are Mexican, and Americans’ familiarity with the food and conviviality is always part of the draw. Let’s face it, the mere idea that there will be a margarita and a bowl of chips in front of you soon after you sit down (not something you expect at a sushi bar) is magnetic enough, and the food in even Tex-Mex places is easy to love.
                        When a new place like Casa TuLuM adds to the expectations a striking décor, exceptional service and authentic Mexican food that has been refined but is not intimidating—no grasshoppers or worms on the menu—it is well worth a trip to the increasingly delightful South Street Seaport neighborhood.
                        There is a clear personal touch to everything that Managing Partner Luis Villanueva and Chef/Partner Rodrigo Abrajan (from Puebla, Mexico, starting in New York with an East Harlem taco cart)  bring to TuLuM, whose décor resembles a swank beach house in the Yucatán with effulgent hanging plants, natural wood slats, leather chairs and videos of Gulf of Mexico beach scenes. And, much to my applause, tablecloths. When I visited the noise level was moderate, with just 55 seats and 15 at the bar, especially the anteroom to the rear. At the bar some booming music intrudes.
                        The menu is in three sections, beginning with very good traditional guacamole with freshly made corn chips ($16);  even better is the King guacamole ($20) that incorporates crabmeat, crisp jicama and habanero chilies (below). These are made for the whole table.
                        What makes TuLuM distinctive is not so much novelty as it is the fine tuning, with the best imported ingredients and an attention to layers of flavors and textures not easily found elsewhere in New York. A fine example is the aguachile ($31) of both raw and cooked shrimp, octopus, cherry stone clams, lime juice and seven dried chilies with red onions cucumbers and avocado that you scoop up and get waves of tastes on your pallet. Ceviche TuLuM ($20) is similar but simpler, with raw Gulf  shrimp with avocado, habanero and cilantro.
            Lobster ceviche ($31) is worth every penny—every dish is meant to be shared—marrying good morsels of lobster with passion fruit and litchi, Mango, chile arbol, crunchy, sweet pomegranate seeds and baked multi-grain tostados, which makes my claim about the textures quite clear. In the pincho tacos section you definitely should order the “Governador” ($24), two tortillas bulked up with both shrimp and steak, Chihuahua cheese gratin, and chiltepin tomato salsa. The choice of different chilies for their sweetness, toastiness, smokiness and heat, is critical to Abrajan’s cooking and makes all the difference.
                        Dishes get still heartier in the Los Platos Fuertes section, starting with traditional enchiladas suizas (right) made with juicy chicken (so often it comes dry) with tomatillo, Serrano creamy salsa, and a blend of melted cheeses ($26).  Pescado Zarandeado ($36) is a simply grilled branzino that takes on savory sparks from a marinade of annatto and guajillo chilies, while a duck mole ($41) begins with the bird marinated with coffee-flavored  sauce and then made more delicious with plantains and Mexican rice. One of the most identifiable Yucatán dishes is cochinita pibil ($32), pork shoulder roasted for a long time in banana leaves with achiote paste, cured lime, onion, and habanero chili tetemado (above).
                        Even with a big appetite, you may find yourself sated by then, but do share a sumptuous dessert, especially any made with Mexican chocolate.
                        I haven’t been to America’s southwestern cities recently to see if they are getting more Mexican restaurants at Casa TuLuM’s level of innovation, but it’s indicative of the unending variety of New York’s gastronomy that food and décor of this caliber is down at the once sleepy South Street Seaport.  

Open nightly for dinner.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

 Clerkenwell, London

            As David was on his way to the National Archives that morning,  Katie was on hers to interview the novelist with the woman’s first name, Evelyn Dawes, after having checked his work. It appeared, like many English littérateurs, Dawes had written everything from novels to biographies, histories and literary criticism. Most writers lived on dribs and drabs of money, but, while American writers tended to be pigeonholed by publishers as fiction or non-fiction, the Brits were able to take on work in a wide range of genres. In the end, the money came to much the same, which was rarely very much at all.
            Dawes had had a reputation for a few mystery novels he’d written in the 1960s—The Incident in Alghero and  Something at the Beach were his two most popular—but nothing of his work, except book reviews and essays in the London papers, had been published for more than a decade.  
      The book editor at McClure’s said Dawes had drunk away a lot of the good will he once enjoyed among the literary establishment, and now, on the wagon for five years, he had little to look forward to at six each evening, except watching the BBC. Still, the editor had told Katie, his mind was sharp and his memory for detail prodigious. Most important, Dawes had been a close friend of Graham Greene up until his death.
            Dawes had lived since the 1960s on Margery Street in Clerkenwell,  Central London, once an industrial area that had begun to gentrify in the 1980s, and his flat had been part of a well proportioned segmented loft.  Katie was there on time, ten o’clock, and rang the bell of the second-story flat several times before an elderly voice answered through an intercom and without asking who was ringing or identifying himself said, “I’ll need about ten minutes to put myself together. Please be so kind as to call back then.”
            “Late riser,” Katie said to herself, or Dawes had forgotten about their appointment. She took the time to walk a block or two, found a Caffé Nero and nursed a cappuccino while going over notes. She gave Dawes five minutes’ grace and rang his doorbell again.
            “Yes?”
            “Mr. Dawes, it’s Katie Cavuto, from the States.”
            There was a pause, then, “Ah, yes, yes, of course. So sorry, Miss Cavuto. Yes, I knew you were coming but I got up a bit late and needed to shake the cobwebs out first.”
            “Not a problem,” said Katie. “Do you need some more time?” 
            “No, no, come on up,” and the buzzer rang.
          The hallway and stairs in the building had certainly not gone through gentrification, and Dawes’s gray metal door looked left over from its industrial past. There was no doorbell, so Katie knocked, and, after ten seconds, the door clicked open to reveal Mr. Evelyn Dawes, all six feet of him.
            “Come in, come in, come in,” he said, pushing aside some papers on the floor. “Place is a mess. Always is, I’m afraid.  All these damn books gather so much dust and they’re so damn difficult to clean. Hope you’re not allergic.”
            “Not to book dust,” said Katie, who reveled in the smell of old books, though she’d never seen a room with so little else in it except books, not just on the shelves lining ever square inch of the walls outside a kitchenette but also piled high on the floor. She was hardly surprised to find an old cat of indeterminate color curled on a sofa between the piles.
            “I just made some extra tea for you, in case you’d like some,” said Dawes, who looked every bit his seventy-eight years, as did his clothes, which consisted of a tattersall shirt, grayish cardigan and brown corduroy slacks. He was still in his bedroom slippers, which Katie figured he rarely got out of.  His eyes registered olive green in the dim light of the place, his hair in disarray, his eyebrows more so.
            “Sit down, sit down. May I call you Katie?”
            “Please do.”
            “Excellent. Call me Evelyn—with a long E.”
            For a split second that sounded very amusing to Katie.
            “So, I understand from your friend at McClure’s magazine you wanted to chat about my friend Graham Greene?” said the author.
            “If we could.”
            Dawes waved his hand and said, “Happy to oblige. One of the best friends I ever had and one of the few who never betrayed me.”
            “Why would he or anyone want to betray you?” asked Katie.
            “Oh, nothing sinister. Literary debates, my making one too many enemies in the establishment press, that sort of thing. But, yes, Greene always defended me and was willing to write some very nice things on my behalf when I was attacked. Capital fellow.”
            “From all I’ve read, loyalty to his friends was paramount to Greene.”
            Dawes gave his head a vigorous shake and pounded his fist on a book.
            “Absolutely! Paramount is the word. Graham could attack, bite back, joust with the best of them, even to the point of some pretty smarmy gossip. But, when it came to his friends, there was no wavering, even when he knew the man was a blackguard. And he knew plenty of them.”
            “Well, that’s what I’m looking into,” said Katie. “I’m trying to find out if Greene had any personal inspiration among his friends for the character of Harry Lime in the movie The Third Man.”
            Dawes smiled broadly and arched his head backwards. “Ah, Harry Lime! My God, what a good character, so minimally drawn but so magnificently made flesh by Orson Welles!  Did you know he wrote the most famous lines in the movie?”
            “The ones about Switzerland and the cuckoo clock?”
            “Exactly. Brilliant addition. Something only an American like Harry would say. Graham was never very good writing American speech. I met Welles once and congratulated him on his performance, and of course he reminded me that he’d written that little speech for Harry. Did you know Welles went on to do dozens of episodes on radio as Harry Lime, though not as a criminal?”
            “I never knew that. They made a whole radio show about Lime? Was Greene involved?” 
            “I doubt it. Graham had gotten too famous by then to trifle with radio.” (Katie made a note to look into the show.)  “Anyhow, as to whether Graham based Harry on a real-life friend of his, well, I’m sure he did, at least parts of Lime. A lot of people believe it was Graham’s very, very good friend Kim Philby, whom he adored. He once told me, ‘I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused’—a line he later used in one of his novels.”
            “I’ve read that,” said Katie, “and I have to say it confuses me. It seems to me it’s one thing to love a person, even if that person has many flaws, but for Greene to continue to go to bat for a convicted traitor?"
            “Well, remember, if I’ve got the dates right, Philby wasn’t exposed as a traitor for many years after The Third Man. So, if Graham had suspicions about Philby early on, he killed Lime off. Awfully convenient way for Graham to get Philby—if that’s who it was—out of mind.”
            “True,” said Katie, “Lime’s old friend Holly Martins is the one who shoots him in the sewer, because he’s realized what an awful human being Lime really is.”
            “Well, that, to me, is debatable,” said Dawes, “for two reasons: First, Holly begs Lime to give himself up, but Lime refuses. Then, just a brief second before the gunshot echoes in the tunnel—marvelous sound!—Lime looks at Holly and slightly, ever so slightly, seems to nod as if to say, ‘You do it, Holly. I want it to be you.’  Which is in its own warped way a final act of friendship. And to tell you the truth, I think it was probably Welles’s idea. That nod is almost imperceptible—it could have been a slight gulp of fear—a bare opening of his lips. Brilliant.”
            Katie had not thought of that—the business of it being Welles’s idea—though it was clear Lime preferred being killed by his old friend than captured by the military police.
            “Now,” said Dawes, pushing himself up on the arms of the chair, “whether Philby figures into all that, I really haven’t a clue.”
            Katie tried to shift the subject slightly. “Did you know Philby?”
            “No, never met him. He ran off to Russia before I’d even met Graham. But Graham spoke about him a good deal. It made no sense to me—everybody in our crowd loathed Philby for what he’d done—but Graham actually prided himself on being the only one who really knew what was going on in Philby’s mind—what was behind the mask, he used to say. After all, Philby was Graham’s mentor at MI6, and both dealt in subterfuge on a daily basis. What Graham seemed blind to, however, was that Philby—everybody, really—wears a lot of different masks, and double agents have as many as they have passports.”
            “Did Greene actually write a preface to Philby’s memoirs, My Private War?”
            “Oh, he did indeed. To Graham, Philby was an idealist, not a traitor. It was rather pathetic. Graham was a Catholic convert and could appear to be a staunch one at times, when it was convenient, though not when he was sleeping with other men’s wives. But, when he compared Philby’s embrace of Communism as a religion and his activities to British Catholics spying for Spain against England because they were being persecuted at home, well, that is deeply disturbing to me. I’m a Catholic—born one, but happily lapsed—and I find such an analogy an ugly blasphemy.” 
            “One could hardly make that case for Harry Lime,” said Katie.
            “Decidedly no. Lime was only in it for himself. He tried to portray himself as an idealist and at the same time would say, ‘May we all live to see the red flag flying on Buckingham Palace and the White House.’ I’m sure such a statement would irk Greene no end. And that’s why I think the link between Lime and Philby is tenuous at best, like both their full names having three syllables. I don’t doubt that Graham knew secrets about Philby’s life and work no one else did and might well have kept his mouth shut out of loyalty.  So, in that sense, Philby is a candidate. Novelists always take the smallest of things and blow them up into important ones. Graham did it, I do it, or did it. Had a character in one of my books based on a fellow I met in college one afternoon and never saw again. I based a major figure on him, simply because he was such an unusual, very witty, very ugly fellow who somehow charmed all the girls.”
            “So,” asked Katie, “you think there were other candidates who made up a composite of Lime?”
            “I suspect so. That’s usually how it works in novels. I always wondered where Edgar Allen Poe found all his grotesques. Not to mention where Shakespeare found his Iago and Caliban.”
            It began to dawn on Katie that what Dawes had told her was probably the truth of the matter. Lime was not based on any one person but more probably on many, along with aspects sprung entirely from Greene’s own imagination, which she’d learned was teeming with flawed men driven to desperation on both sides of the law.
            If that was the whole story, it was, as Alan Dobell had said, a rip-roaring yarn for a little-read literary magazine with a name like The Sewanee Review. It might make a good dissertation for a doctoral student, but not for a general interest magazine like McClure’s.