New Brunswick, Connecticut, 1939
He heard the snap of the pulley’s release and felt himself collapse onto the hard floor. In the aching blur that settled over him, he could feel the chill of the concrete. Perhaps at some point the pain had simply unstrung his senses, ripped out the wiring that connected him to time.
The door opened, then closed, but Danforth didn’t know if his torturer had left or if someone else had entered. He listened for footsteps but heard none, and so, after a time, he decided that he was alone. He wanted to move but couldn’t.
“Get him up.”
Then he was lifted from the floor, the muscles of his arms so unnaturally stretched they’d lost their power to flex, his hands like weights at the end of a burning tangle of ligament and bone.
Now he was moving down the hallway, carried like a broken toy in his torturer’s arms, then plopped down in the chair before Fedora’s desk.
He sat, slumped and drained, barely able to keep himself in the chair, and waited as Fedora took his place behind the desk.
“Are you passing?” he asked. “Are you a secret Jew?”
Danforth didn’t answer.
“What else can explain it?” Fedora asked. “This . . . stubbornness.” He seemed amused by the taunting. “Do you think England will stop the Communists? France? America?” He laughed. “Perhaps you don’t want them to be stopped. Perhaps you are a secret Communist and a secret Jew.”
Danforth stared at Fedora silently.
“Do you know what they are doing, the Reds?” Fedora asked. “They are ripping down everything. They are waiting to swarm over Europe, and then they will swarm over us.” He leaned forward slightly and looked closely at Danforth, his gaze probing, a man digging through a cluttered box. “Why are you helping them? America and Germany have the same enemy. Even the English know that.”
Danforth knew that the slightest movement would send sheets of pain through his rib cage, and so he sat motionlessly and stared straight ahead. After a moment, he felt sensation in his toes, then his fingers, a glimmer of power returning to the far reaches of his body. It was like the first fibrous tingling of a phantom limb, and he experienced it as an awakening, the sure and certain evidence that for all the damage done, it was not irrevocable.
“Listen to me,” Fedora said sharply.
Danforth tried to focus on the man behind the desk.
“Pay attention to what I am saying.”
Danforth’s head lolled back slightly, but with effort he drew it up again.
“I think you believe that somehow you’re going to get out of this without any real damage,” Fedora said. “Get out of it and go back to your nice warm little club.”
Danforth felt his muscles moving like tiny insects beneath his skin, a delicate tremble that quickened his flesh with soft, regenerative spasms, and by that movement shook him to a somewhat greater clarity of mind. The haze of pain was lifting, and in its departing mists, the room took on its familiar proportions and no longer seemed skewed and off balance. His mind was returning to him like an old friend.
“But that’s not true,” Fedora said.
The clouds of pain continued to part, and as they did so, Danforth steadily regained his bearings, remembering things he had forgotten, the way at one point Fedora had splashed his body with ice-cold water, the stinging feel of being slapped.
Fedora opened the desk drawer to his right, took out a small spoon, and laid it down on the table. “I’m going to scoop out your eyes, my dear fellow. First one, then the other.” He allowed Danforth to focus his starkly clarifying consciousness upon the spoon, then he picked it up and pointed it directly at Danforth’s eyes.
“Where is Anna Klein?” Fedora asked.
It was at that moment the gorgeous vistas of Danforth’s life turned against him as insidiously as a traitor in the ranks. For he instantly recalled in scores of simultaneous images all the magnificent things his eyes had seen: the snowcapped heights of Fuji, the walls of Avila, Hong Kong from the Peak, Uluru impossibly radiant in a sunset glow.
“Tie his hands,” Fedora said.
Someone stepped behind Danforth’s chair, drew his hands around the back of the chair, and tied them.
“So,” Fedora said when this was done. He lifted the spoon, and it glinted in the light. “So.”
The first wave of panic came in an uncontrollable shaking of his legs, a quaking Danforth experienced as an inward disintegration of his will. It was as if the little island of himself had been struck by a boiling wave that instantly dissolved whatever it touched.
In a suspended instant of intensely clear thought, he saw that he could have faced a pistol without faltering. To die, given the pains that still racked him, would not at that moment have seemed so great a forfeit. Death was only darkness, after all, an oblivion that offered no reminders of what had been lost. But to lose his sight? To see nothing more of this earth forever?
It was a crazed distinction, and he was not unaware of how crazed it was. And yet he felt himself helplessly melting in the curled fist of this one engulfing dread, all that was solid, all that had held up, now evaporating in the impossible heat of a terror he had not expected and against which he could offer no resistance: the love he had for things as yet unseen.
And what’s the most beautiful thing you’ve never seen?
The question returned to him in Anna’s voice, her words so clear that he all but expected Anna suddenly to materialize before him, and the fact that it was this memory of her that most weakened and tormented him seemed the cruelest of ironies.
Fedora was beside him now, his fingers wrapped around the handle of the spoon. His fingers were long and thin; perfect, Danforth thought, for playing the piano.
Fedora drew in a long breath. “So.” He pressed the tip of the spoon beneath Danforth’s left eye. “Where is Anna Klein?”
Danforth thought of the Atlas Mountains, the plains of Kilimanjaro, and last of the Seto Sea from the heights of Miyajima, that storied place his father had said no man should die without seeing.
“Where is Anna Klein?” Fedora repeated.
Danforth felt the answer well up from below, like a swollen gorge rising from his belly, surging up into his throat.
“For the last time,” Fedora said. “Where is Anna Klein?”
Danforth felt the edge of the spoon press down then tilt upward, and with that tiny, otherwise insignificant pinch, Anna’s address exploded toward his mouth so that he could feel his lips forming them, his breath ready to release them, all of them . . . now.
“Well done.”
It was a vaguely familiar voice, and as if at its command, Fedora drew back the spoon and almost immediately untied Danforth’s hands, then gently turned his swivel chair toward the door, where Danforth saw Bannion standing like a guardian of the gate, Clayton beside him, both staring at him with unmistakable admiration.
There were footsteps outside the door, and at the sound, both Clayton and Bannion straightened themselves, as if ordered to attention.
The door opened and she was there, Anna, standing stiffly, like a soldier. She seemed hardly to notice the other men in the room. Her attention was entirely on Danforth, and for a moment her eyes moved over him soothingly, like fingertips.
“We’ll go to France together then,” she said.
As he would remind himself down all the many years to come, he had not been able to determine at that moment whether she was obeying an order or issuing it. He could only see her steeliness, and so he stared at her brokenly, still trembling with fear and rocked by the eddies of his own retreating pain, yet determined to steel himself against whatever might befall him in some future interrogation. Next time, he would keep faith with Anna no matter what, he told himself, even to the point of a spoon.
~ * ~
PART III
Chekov’s Hammer
~ * ~
Century Club, New York City, 2001
“It was a moment of knight-errantry I suppose,” Danforth said in a voice that was darkly nostalgic, like that of a man recalling a struggle he had almost won. “And it was probably the origin of my obsession.”
Knight-errantry? Obsession?
This was the stuff of romantic fiction, I thought, though oddly so, part King Arthur’s Round Table, part Sigmund Freud’s couch.
Then suddenly I recalled a line I’d read as an undergraduate. It had been attributed to Kenneth Patchen, a Greenwich Village poet: Boxers punch harder when women are around. If this was what Danforth’s story reduced to, his need to win the hand of a mysterious woman, then surely I was wasting my time. I glanced outside. The snow was deepening. I’d flown in last night; the hotel room was booked through tomorrow, but I’d decided to leave right after today’s interview. I hadn’t checked out yet, though, which was fortunate, since there would probably not be a plane this evening. Still, no doubt the Acela train would be running. If Danforth’s tale proved increasingly prosaic, I could cut the interview short and be snugly back in my Arlington apartment by nine o’clock.
“The whole thing was staged, that’s what you’re saying?” I asked in order to return Danforth to the subject at hand.
“Yes,” Danforth answered. “Bannion had insisted on it, Clayton told me later. To protect Anna. If I passed the test, I would go with her to France.”
“Did Anna know beforehand that you were going to be . . . tested?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Danforth answered. “I never asked her.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Probably because I didn’t want to know,” Danforth answered frankly. “To think that she might have been sitting in the room next door, listening to my screams. That would not have been a good thing.”
“Why not?”
“Because it would have suggested that Anna was a woman without limits,” Danforth said, “and wisdom is about proportion, Paul, about having a sense of proportion.”
This seemed little more than a weary restatement of the golden mean, and so I glanced down at my notes, saw a gap, and sought to fill it.
“How did Anna come to the Project, by the way?” I asked. “It’s not clear who recruited her.”
“Bannion recruited her,” Danforth answered. “At first I thought she might have been a member of one of his Communist cells. But it turns out he’d known her almost from the time she’d first come to America. He’d been a Shabbos goy, working at one of the synagogues on the Lower East Side. Anna was learning Hebrew from a rabbi there. Later, Bannion had gone off to do Party work, and after that to Spain. He’d come back quite disillusioned with Communism, Anna told me, but looking for a way to fight Fascism.”
“So he was one of those men who have to have causes,” I said in a worldly tone.
Danforth nodded slowly. “I’ve learned that ideology is a room without windows, Paul,” he said. “You can only see what’s already inside it.” He shrugged. “It’s the same with a political cause. Once you commit yourself to it, it’s hard to find limits, hard to say, ‘This I will not do, even for my cause.’ The Project was like that, something that found its way into your blood.”
“So at this point, were you told what the Project was?” I asked.
“Yes,” Danforth said. “It had to do with making contact with a large group of displaced Spaniards who’d fled to France toward the end of the Spanish civil war. The French had interned them in quite a few scattered camps. The thinking was that these Spaniards who’d fought against Franco and retreated into France could now be organized and equipped to fight against the Germans in the event that France was invaded.”
“To field an army,” I said. “That’s quite ambitious.”
“Very, yes,” Danforth answered. “Ambitious enough to accomplish something, which was the goal, after all. For that reason, I think you’ll agree that it was an idea worth exploring.”
“I suppose so.”
“And protecting.”
I nodded.
“Even to the point of romantic deception,” Danforth added. “Bitter though that may be.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean by ‘romantic deception,”‘ I told him,
“No, of course not,” Danforth said. He thought a moment, then asked, “Do you know The Maltese Falcon?”
“The old movie, with Humphrey Bogart.”
“I was thinking of the book,” Danforth said. “But, yes, the same story. Except that in the book things go a little differently, so that when Sam Spade discovers that Brigid O’Shaughnessy pretended to love him but never did, he strips her naked. He does this literally, Paul. And then —at least metaphorically — he sends her to her death.”
I sensed a curious turn in Danforth’s story, a tingling that suggested the plot, as they say, had thickened.
“And such a person would be worthy of death, don’t you think?” Danforth asked, his voice now very cold and hard. “A traitor?”
“Yes,” I said firmly.
“Even if you loved this traitor, as I’m sure you’ll agree,” Danforth added. “And even if, perhaps, an innocent person was also put in danger.” He leaned forward slightly. “Because what secures man’s moral life, Paul, is accountability. And accountability is based on punishment, the more sure and certain, the better.” Now he sat back. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
He was silent for a moment, his gaze very steadily upon me, then he said, “Later, I came to wonder just how many parts Anna had acted. She once told me that she’d worked for a few weeks at a French construction firm on Vandam Street, translating correspondence. It turns out that this was true. I know because I checked the records.”
Checked the records? So Danforth had carried out some sort of investigation of Anna, I thought, one he’d conducted after the war. Why, I wondered, had he done that?
But before I could ask him directly, Danforth posed a question of his own.
“Tell me, Paul, have you seen much of the world?”
“Some,” I answered.
“Asia? Africa?”
“No.”
“The Middle East?”
I shook my head. “I’m not a world traveler, if that’s your point,” I said a little sharply.
A vague dreaminess came over him. “The Seto Sea,” he said. “I went there three years ago. They have a rope way, a cable car that takes you up Mount Misen.” Briefly, he seemed captured by that moment in his past. Then quite abruptly, he returned to the present, though not directly to his tale.
“Did you know that Kyoto was at the top of the list of cities marked for the first atomic bomb?” he asked.
“No,” I confessed.
“General Groves wanted Kyoto bombed first,” Danforth told me. “It was the ancient Japanese capital, so its destruction would devastate Japanese morale, he said. It was also surrounded by mountains that would concentrate the blast.” He drained the last of the port. “But Secretary of War Stimson scratched Kyoto off the list. He’d been there, you see. Twice, actually. Once on his honeymoon.” He looked at me significantly. “It’s hard to destroy something you have reason to love.” His smile struck me as a direct warning. “Travel removes places from the target list, Paul. In a way, it removed Paris. A German general refused to destroy it and lied to Hitler when he was asked if Paris was burning.”
“Yes,” I said, somewhat relieved that I was familiar with this story “I read about that.”
“That general made a wise choice,” Danforth said. “Paris is a beautiful city. Anna and I arrived there the third week in May.”
Ah, I thought, he has, according to his style, wound back to his narrative.
“I’d rented two apartments on the Left Bank, just off Saint-Germain-des-Prés,” Danforth said.
“Two apartments?” I asked.
“You mean, did we sleep together?” Danforth asked. “Is that what you want to know, Paul? Did Anna and I have fantastic sex then enjoy a petit déjeuner on a flower-filled terrace with the towers of Notre Dame in the distance?”
I had to admit that his earlier mention of the “erotics of intrigue” had rather surreptitiously asserted itself.
“Something like that,” I said, a little embarrassed that I had given this away so blatantly.
Danforth straightened one sleeve of his jacket. “No, we were not lovers.”
What they were, or later became, sparkled briefly in his eyes, then vanished like a candle tossed down a well.
“But Paris was beautiful, a city of lights,” Danforth added. “And there was the touch of intrigue I felt every time Anna presented her passport, the very American name she’d chosen: she was now Anna Collier. Everything gave off a certain dramatic charge and made my little world a tad brighter.” He drew in a breath that was quick and light, yet with something heavy at its center. “Even in those dark days.”
~ * ~
Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, France, 1939
They sat down a little distance from the L’Orangerie, both tired from the day’s long walk. During the last few hours, they’d reconnoitered the city, an expedition that had taken them from Passy, where Balzac had lived his extravagant life, to the groves of Père-Lachaise, where that life had come to rest. They’d wandered the streets of Pigalle and mounted the stairs to Sacré Coeur. In that way, street by street, Paris had revealed itself as all great cities do, like an exotic dancer shedding one veil at a time.
Anna looked out over the park, gazing first at a group of children in their school uniforms, then at an old man in a black beret, and finally at a young couple strolling arm in arm down one of the neatly manicured paths.
“Our city of intrigue,” Danforth said lightly.
In later years, he would consider how odd it was that he was there, how little he’d known, and he’d see this as emblematic of the decision to break free from the moorings of his former life. Despite the peril that followed, when he recalled sitting with Anna in the Jardin des Tuileries that evening, he regretted nothing about his decision to accompany her, not the complex business matters he’d abruptly left in the care of others, or even the consternation his sudden departure from New York had caused his father. The only thing that mattered to him was that he’d cast all that aside and embarked on a course whose outcome he could not foresee, a journey — the first of his life — that had no clear destination. At that moment, as he would often in the future recall, he’d felt only the sense that what he’d done was right and that to have done anything else would have been wrong.
And he’d been busy, after all. His little act of subterfuge required him to perform as an importer, and so, upon arriving in Paris, he’d met with several of his Parisian business associates, looked at the merchandise in their shops and small warehouses, with Anna always at his side, taking notes, perfect in her role as his dutiful assistant, her French flawless. By then she’d learned quite a bit about antiques and art and could tell the genuine from the fake; from time to time she even felt confident enough to suggest a price or reject one.
Toward evening they found themselves at the Place de Grève, and Danforth suddenly thought of the execution of Damiens, the unbearable torments he had suffered on this very spot. At that thought Danforth returned to his ordeal in the Connecticut warehouse, and from that point suddenly imagined Anna in the custody of such men, the insult and humiliation they would add to whatever tortures they administered, because it had always been so with torturing women. It was not a subject he could bring up, however; it would serve no purpose, and so he simply guided their walk toward the banks of the Seine, where they strolled slowly and for the most part silently as the river’s boats and barges cruised by.
“It all seems like the quiet before the storm, doesn’t it?” he said finally.
Anna nodded. “Unless the storm can be stopped.”
The remark struck Danforth as odd since, as he’d learned by then, the Project was not concerned with preventing the coming war. The goal was to make sure that any German advance would encounter opposition from an unexpected quarter, an undertaking far more extensive than he’d imagined and whose feasibility it was Anna’s — and now his — mission to explore.
He said nothing of this, however, so they walked on in silence until they reached a large hall where a crowd had gathered.
“It’s Daladier,” Anna said.
In the years after the war, as one by one the tiny lights went on in his brain, Danforth would try to recall the precise details of what followed next: the look in Anna’s eyes as she watched the prime minister of France move through the crowd; the way the people pressed in toward him; the chaotic nature of that crowd, the women bearing flowers, the tradesmen with packages, and here and there a lone man with his hands sunk deep into the pockets of his trousers or his jacket or, as Danforth noted in one case, tucked beneath a bloodstained apron.
“He seems quite fearless,” Anna said, her gaze intense as she studied the way Daladier moved through the crowd, a short, stocky man, looking very much like what he was called: the bull of Vaucluse.
“Heads of state have to be fearless these days,” Danforth said.
Daladier disappeared into a building, and the crowd began to disperse. Anna, however, remained in place, seemingly still captivated by the scene that had just played out before her: a public figure publicly adored, confident in the adulation of the crowd through which he’d moved.
Was that the moment, Danforth asked himself on the countless occasions when he replayed this scene, when Anna had first thought of a quite different plot, one considerably more dangerous? Or had the Project never been anything more than a smoke screen to her, its only goal to conceal the real plot behind it? Had it always been her plan that they would appear as innocents, amateurs, Americans on a fool’s errand? Years later, as he combed through everything from government records to spy fiction, Danforth would continually wonder if he had from the very beginning been a dupe, manipulated at every turn, little more than a string she’d artfully wound around her finger.
But on that evening, Danforth could think only of Anna’s mood and the silence that once again enveloped her as they headed home and that was not broken until they reached her door, where, to their surprise, they found a young man waiting for them.
“I am Christophe,” he said.
The man who spoke was only a few years older than they, and in Danforth’s view, he hardly looked the part of a secret agent. His hair was black, and he wore spectacles, but his ragged clothes set him apart and gave him the look of an impoverished student.
“My English is very good,” Christophe assured them. “I lived in America for some years.” He nodded down the boulevard. “Please, come. We can talk in my room.”
The walk to Christophe’s room was longer than Danforth had expected, and it ended on a block considerably seedier than any he had yet visited. The front door creaked loudly as Christophe opened it and motioned them into the dank, smelly interior of the building.
“Just up the stairs,” Christophe said.
His room was on the third floor, and it was a true garret, crowded with books and magazines that lay in great stacks all around the place. A musty odor came from these papers that Danforth recognized as the same one that came from Christophe’s jacket, and probably his shirt and socks and hair.
“Would you like a glass of wine?” Christophe asked.
Danforth said that he would, but Anna declined, as always, a dedication to sobriety he took to be emblematic of her seriousness, though later he would wonder if this too had only been a show.
Christophe produced a jug of red wine, and after pouring it, lifted his glass, and spoke in Spanish. “Hasta la victoria,” he said.
“Victory over what?” Anna asked.
“Over the Germans,” Christophe answered.
“Were not at war with Germany yet,” she reminded him.
“I am,” Christophe said. He turned to Danforth. “I have been since Guernica.”
Christophe had met Bannion when they’d been in the International Brigades, a group of young men from all over the world who’d rallied to the anti-Fascist cause, shipped out to Spain, fought bravely but hopelessly, and then returned to their native lands.
“They sang an American song,” Christophe told them cheerfully. “‘Red River Valley.’ All the time, they sang it.”
Christophe had the starry-eyed look of an idealist, Danforth thought. There was a boundless naiveté in the way he went on to praise his fellow brigadiers, a blindness to human nature he suspected most idealists shared since, in order to believe such ideals, they first had to believe that all men were as innocent as they.
“As you know, our hope is to use the great number of Spanish in France now,” Christophe said at the conclusion of his brief paean to his own lost cause. “These are republican soldiers who escaped over the Pyrenees before Spain fell to Franco. The French have put them in what they call transit camps. Le Vernet d’Ariege, Saint-Cyprien, Barcares, Argeles, Gurs.” He looked suddenly toward Anna. “These men are seasoned fighters. And they know that if the Germans overrun France, they will all be killed or sent back to Spain.” His eyes did not leave Anna’s. “Escape is not difficult. At Gurs, for example, the barbed wire is only two feet high, and there are no guardhouses.”
None of this was news to Danforth, as he’d spent the last of his time in New York being filled in on the Project by Clayton and Bannion. Even so, he listened intently as Christophe talked about how many displaced Spaniards were currently in France, almost a quarter million. They had proven their courage, and their hatred of the Germans was intense. They were Spaniards, he said, and therefore they were brave. Surely arrangements could be made to arm and supply them if war broke out between Germany and France.
Danforth would long recall the fervent nature of Christophe’s argument, his deep love for his Spanish comrades. But it was the suffering at the Spanish internment camps Christophe most powerfully described: the poor food and shelter, the anguish of their defeat and subsequent dispossession. It was a vision that Danforth found quite moving, though he saw almost no response to it in Anna’s eyes. Rather, she peppered Christophe with questions that were almost entirely logistical, as if her intent were not simply to make contact and later train and supply this ghostly army, but to lead it.
“So,” Christophe said when Anna had asked the last of her questions, “the next step is that you go to Gurs, mademoiselle.”
The arrangements were made the next day, and three days after that, Danforth and Anna set off from Paris on a southwestern journey through the heart of France that he found utterly exhilarating and that filled him with an inexpressible joy. He recognized that this happiness was fanciful and romantic, but he could not — even later, after all was known — strip this journey of its tingling pleasure or of the sense that he would never live higher or more passionately than he lived at that moment.
At Urdos station, the mountain passes of the Atlantic Pyrenees loomed ahead, but Danforth found nothing ominous in their high, jagged walls. Oloron-Sainte-Marie lay before them, and a short time later they stood before the old doors of Sainte-Marie. It had been a smooth journey thus far, but also a long one, though Danforth didn’t feel in the least depleted by it. He was on the road again, like the boy of old, only this time destined to pursue a higher goal than the purchase of Etruscan pottery or an Afghan rug.
“The Romans tramped through these ravines,” he told Anna. “These were the gates of Western Europe.”
But on the road that day, there was only a group of pilgrims bound for Santiago de Compostela. They were a ragged assemblage, French peasants who seemed unchanged from the Middle Ages save for their clothes. The trudging of this ancient route was no doubt a powerful act of faith, and Danforth noticed a curious sympathy for them in Anna’s eyes; perhaps this ritualized Christian journey reminded her of the Hasidim of Delancey Street, the way they also went on foot to their sacred houses.
Once the little group of pilgrims had passed, she turned idly toward the church doors, and Danforth saw that she was peering at the base of one of the church’s supporting columns: two medieval peasants, standing back to back, the great weight of the column on their small shoulders.
“Peasants doing their duty,” Danforth said lightly. “Despite the burden, I mean.” He looked at them more closely. “Contented with their place in the chain of being.”
Anna’s gaze remained on the two bent figures, their faces not at all strained as the vast weight pressed down upon them.
“Oppression often looks like harmony,” she said.
It was a remark that seemed to come from the darkest of her experiences, her expression as solemn as her voice, so entirely genuine that Danforth would for many years refuse to consider that it might have been a mask.
“Monsieur?”
Danforth turned to see a small, stooped figure standing just beyond the church door, his scruffy brown hat clutched in both hands, meekly, like a servant.
“I Diego,” he said in deeply accented English.
He was dressed raggedly, and Danforth, with his keen eye for such things, noticed every dangling thread and nodding button.
“I show you camp,” Diego said.
Danforth stepped forward and offered his hand, which Diego took in the shy, uncertain way of men abruptly dispossessed.
“I’m Tom,” Danforth told him in Spanish. “And this is Anna.”
“A pleasure,” Diego replied in his native tongue, with a quick bow toward Anna. “I have a car,” he said in Spanish, and he never again reverted to English. He motioned toward the small street that led away from the church. “Please come.”
They followed Diego to a mud-splattered Renault that Danforth thought at least fifteen years old. The black exterior paint had long ago lost its gloss, and the running boards were caked with past generations of gray Pyrenean dust. It wheezed pitiably as the engine turned, and the chaise shook and rattled before it finally jerked forward, heaved backward, then bolted forward again in the comic way of silent movies. Danforth could almost imagine a bespectacled Harold Lloyd fearfully clutching its worn black steering wheel.
“We should not go too close to the camp,” Diego said, “but you will see it very well.”
The drive from Oloron-Sainte-Marie was brief, but on the way, Danforth noticed a few straggling French soldiers, their rifles held in the loose, jaunty way of stage actors as they marched raggedly southward. They had the beards and handlebar mustaches of the typical poulie, the type of soldier renowned since Napoleon, rustic, undisciplined and indisputably courageous, men who at Chemin des Dames had charged from their trenches contemptuously braying in loud and profoundly mocking imitation of sheep going to slaughter.
“The guards get drunk,” Diego said scornfully as the old Renault jostled past a knot of laughing soldiers. “But we Spanish, we have nowhere to go, so we stay behind the wire.”
“But you escaped,” Anna said.
“Yes, I escaped,” Diego said wearily. “For two months I ate grass and snow. Then an old woman took me in. She lives high in the mountains.” He laughed. “A crazy old thing. Very nice, but crazy. She said to me ... in French, she said, ‘Combien des Louis maintenent?’ She made a big joke. ‘How many Louises have there been?’” He laughed again. “She thought there were still kings in France.”
Diego was a careful driver, but the Renault was anything but compliant, and with the slip and slide of the muddy road, it occasionally veered violently to the left or right, making Danforth and Anna collide in its cramped back seat, each time with a little laugh, and, for Danforth, a small electric thrill at her touch.
Later it would seem to Danforth the height of solipsism that he had felt no dread as he approached the transit camp at Gurs. In fact, he had felt only the continuing elation of their recent journey; he was still adrift in its intrigue but more keenly aware of the physical nearness of Anna and of the increasingly intense nature of the experience they were to share.
Afloat in that phantasm, he scarcely felt the old Renault grind to a halt and barely heard Diego’s whispered “Through the trees.”
Diego went to the trees and motioned them forward and down, so they were in a low crouch by the time they reached him. Anna got out first, but Danforth had joined her by the time she got to the trees. “Six thousand now,” Diego said, “but every day it gets bigger.” He pointed. “There.”
Years later, in the midst of his own dark search, Danforth would see a grainy black-and-white photo of the camp taken from the water tower by a camera aimed straight into the bowels of the site. It would appear quite expansive in the photograph, with column after column of wooden barracks that reached as far as the eye could see. In that picture, Gurs had seemed as large as Auschwitz when he’d later walked those bleak grounds, still searching for a clue as to how it had all happened, and where he had gone wrong.
But on the day he first set eyes on Gurs, Danforth could make out little beyond a scattering of ramshackle barracks hammered together from what appeared to be thin plywood sheets covered with tar paper, a muddy little shantytown that reminded him of the Hoovervilles back home. Captured like a school of fish within its barbed-wire net, the defeated Spaniards seemed defeated indeed, not an army at all, despite what Christophe had said, but a weak rabble, the lost brigade of an equally lost cause.
“No running water,” Diego said. He shook his head. “Others are worse. Saint-Cyprien. Ninety thousand there. Right on the Mediterranean. They have nothing.” He shrugged. “Les Rouges a côté de la mer,” he said sadly in French. “The Reds beside the sea.”
They didn’t linger for very long after that, Diego clearly jumpy and eager to leave. He was, after all, a fugitive, and if captured he would be returned to Gurs or, worse, sent back to Spain, where he would no doubt be either executed or imprisoned.
Back in Oloron-Sainte-Marie, he quickly bid them adieu, and a few minutes later Danforth and Anna went to have dinner at a small restaurant, after which they boarded the night train back to Paris.
“What do you think of the Spanish?” Danforth asked.
“I think that if war comes, they will fight,” Anna answered.
In this, as Danforth would later learn, she had been right. When war did come, the Spanish blew up bridges and sabotaged factories and even managed to kill General von Schaumburg, the German commandant of the region around Paris.
But at the time, Danforth did not know any of this, and the logistics of helping to provision an army of displaced Spaniards seemed daunting, to say the least.
Even so, he said, “We have lots of plans to make.”
“Yes, we do,” Anna said.
And so it had seemed to Danforth that together they would take the next step in the Project, as planned: establish a network within the camps, find secret storage facilities, arrange for the clandestine provision of this most ill-equipped of armies — details that made clear the importance of their many languages.
All of this, Danforth fully expected them to do.
But they never did.
~ * ~
Century Club, New York City, 2001
“Never did?” I asked.
“No,” Danforth said.
“Why?” I asked.
My question appeared to strike him like an infinitely thin blade; rather than answer it, he said, “Tell me, Paul, have you ever heard of Chekhov’s hammer?”
“No,” I answered.
“Chekhov said that at the door of every happy person, there should be someone tapping with a little hammer, just as a reminder, soft but steady, that there are unhappy people in the world.”
He saw that I didn’t get his point.
“On the train back to Paris, I was happy,” Danforth said. “I felt that Anna and I were now true comrades in arms. We had just completed a little investigatory mission and were about to begin the further implementation of the Project. I envisioned this as a long process, with many dramatic turns. Anna would teach me the skills she’d learned at Winterset. We would teach these same skills to various contacts. We would be secret agents. We would live lives of intrigue in service to our shared cause.” He smiled. “Youth is life’s chief deceiver, Paul, and its chief deception is that you will somehow escape the common fate.” The smile withered. “At that moment, with this vision circling in my head, I should have heard that little hammer. Because these would be the last days I would be without suspicion or look forward without fear.”
He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and produced a cable encased in plastic, preserved as if it were a rare document. He handed it to me.
It was dated May 21,1939, and it was from Clayton. He was in London, where he’d encountered “some urgent business problems.” Danforth and Anna were to meet him there as quickly as they could book passage. He was staying at the Savoy. In the meantime, they were to “take care.”
“Well, what do you make of that, Paul?” Danforth asked.
“Nothing,” I said. I handed it back to him.
“It wouldn’t cause you any alarm?”
“About what?”
“Clayton? That he might be a traitor.”
“No,” I said, quite confidently. “Why would it cause me to doubt Clayton?”
“You’re right; it wouldn’t, of course,” Danforth said. “It wouldn’t cause any alarm having to do with a specific person. But in a vague way, it might make you begin to doubt everything. It might produce a sense of things perhaps being not quite right. I mean, just what are these ‘urgent business problems’ about which Anna and I should ‘take care’? You would not doubt Clayton or anyone else. But you would suddenly feel . . . on trembling ground.” He smiled.
“That is the sinister art of deceit, Paul,” he said. “To make things unclear, to allow for multiple interpretations. It’s very effective at disorienting even the most experienced of conspirators, because more than anything, the conspirator seeks certainty. If he is certain he is discovered, he will act accordingly, probably by getting the hell out of town. If he is certain that he is not discovered, he will act accordingly, stay put and carry on with his plot. But when he is truly unsure if he is or is not discovered, he will be in a constant state of fearful disequilibrium. He will sleep, this uncertain conspirator, but he will do it fitfully, and his judgment will be clouded by this lack of rest. He will sleep but this sleep will exhaust and debilitate him and fill his mind with unsettled thoughts and unfounded fears. He will sleep, but only as we wish him to sleep, warily.” His smile was as lupine as the thing he said: “It is called the sleep of wolves.” He returned the cable to his jacket pocket. “We left for London the next day.”
~ * ~
Paris, France, 1939
But they had dinner on the boulevard Raspail the night before they left for London, and while they ate, Danforth told Anna how his father had taught him to be wily and observant. Watch for the unseen, he had told him, and listen for the unsaid.
He hoped, he said, that he had learned those lessons well.
“They are useful lessons,” Anna said, and added nothing else.
After dinner, he walked her to her door, where they parted with a long, close embrace that Danforth found curiously exciting, as if he’d received a jolt of energy, one that lingered long after and finally kept him from sleep. Eventually he rose and headed out into the street.
It had rained earlier in the evening, and now a few soggy papier-mâché remnants of some sort of patriotic celebration hung heavily from balconies and trees. Posters memorializing a glorious past bowed from dripping kiosks, and it seemed to Danforth that all around the city, there was a sense that only the past could be celebrated, because what lay ahead for France, and perhaps for the world, was utterly uncertain.
The windows of the shops were dark, but even in the shadows Danforth could see how much style still mattered to the French. In a bakery, it was in the blush on little marzipan peaches. In a boutique, it was a dress with an impudent ruffle. In a gift shop, a decorative box tied with lace. These small gestures stood against the encroaching doom, Danforth thought, but at the same time he wondered if this was all that stood against it.
Surely not, he decided, and in a kind of reverie he imagined a vastly extended web of heroic conspirators, an army of courageous men and women who passed notes in Viennese cafes and exchanged signals on the Ponte Vecchio. In Budapest they hid crates of arms and loaded them into little boats and sailed them to cadres waiting along the Danube. Other arms came ashore at Marseille or Dubrovnik and were taken far inland by railway car or covered with hay and borne by horse-drawn wagons into the heart of Prague. Surely in Copenhagen and Oslo, and from Calais to Trieste, there were brave men and women who thought of nothing but how this dark tide must be stopped. Surely, Danforth declared to himself, surely at some illuminating moment not far in the future, the blustering Prince of Darkness would confront a rifle behind every blade of grass.
This was not an illusion he could long sustain, however, and by the time he returned to his apartment, his fantasy of a sweeping pan-European resistance had died a dog’s death, and dawn found him by the window, peering out over the boulevard, wondering if he and Anna could still carry out their mission if Clayton’s “urgent business matters” proved more perilous than he’d supposed, or if Clayton himself—the unsettling possibility suddenly struck him — was something other than he seemed.
~ * ~
Century Club, New York City, 2001
“Other than he seemed?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Clayton other than he seemed,” I repeated, now no less unsettled than Danforth had been so many years before. “So that cable had made you suspect that he might be a traitor?”
“That night, as I was standing at the window, yes, that thought did occur to me,” Danforth answered. “But not because of anything I actually knew about Clayton. It was more general than that, and it was very vague. Later, I would come to believe that life itself—when you look it in the eye —is a treacherous thing. It isn’t out to break our hearts, as the Irish say. It’s out to leave us baffled and confused, to strip us of any faith we might have in anyone, even ourselves. That’s what life really is, Paul, a wearing down of trust.”
For the first time, Danforth appeared profoundly weathered, a landscape raked by wind and rain, part of him deeply furrowed, part of him smoothed and softened.
“It can make a man murderous,” he added. “It can make a man reach for a pistol on a warm tropical day.”
Then I saw it for the second time, the quiet capacity Danforth had for violence, how steady it would be, how carefully calculated and reasonably carried out, the way he would kill.
Some hint of this insight surely appeared in my gaze at that moment, because Danforth reacted to it in a way I’d not seen before. Retreat. It seemed to me he had gotten ahead of himself and knew it, and now he forced himself to step back and back and back, until we arrived in London.
~ * ~