“Thank you both for coming,” Clayton began somberly. “This is not something I could say in a cable or letter that might be opened by some curious offi cial.” He appeared quite grave. “It has to do with a report I received not long ago. I want you to know about it in order to calm any doubts you might have.” He looked at Anna. “Or any suspicions.” He took a deep sip from his glass and then began.
“Bannion has a contact in Germany,” he said. “His code name is Rache, and he’s been very good at supplying us with highly reliable information. The latest is that some very wealthy Brits have been regularly making payments to informants in Poland because they expect that country to be invaded. Rache doesn’t know who these Brits are or how many of these informants are on their payroll. He knows only that once the invasion takes place, these informants are supposed to make reports to their backers.” He paused as if truly pained by what he was about to say. “But it’s all a twisted conspiracy, because, according to Rache, these same wealthy men have been turning over the names and addresses of their paid informants to the SS.”
Danforth was a novice in matters of international plots and counterplots, and if Clayton had asked him his opinion at that moment, he would have had to admit that he had not a clue as to the meaning or implication of what he’d just heard.
“Why would they do that?” Anna asked.
“Because these British backers are actually pro-German,” Clayton answered. “They are only pretending to be otherwise.”
Danforth looked at him quizzically.
“The real enemy of these men is the Soviets,” Clayton said. “For that reason, they want the eastern German invasion of Poland to be smooth and fast. The idea is that after the invasion, the Brits will hand over the names of these informants, who’ll be rounded up very quickly, then shot. This will happen immediately, and in a very public way, right in front of neighbors and coworkers. Scores will be killed, but hundreds will be witnesses to their executions. This, the Brits think, will send a shiver through the population and put a stop to any early resistance.”
It seemed a wildly far-fetched scheme, but all Danforth said was “Does this Rache have any proof?”
Clayton shook his head. “No, and Bannion suspects the whole thing is just the usual Communist paranoia.”
“Rache is a Communist?” Danforth asked.
Clayton nodded. “In the underground, yes. Still loyal to his cause, according to Bannion, which is why Bannion doesn’t take this plot seriously.” He looked at me. “But he insisted that I warn you and Anna anyway.” His smile was anything but cheery. “And so I have.”
“What do you think of this report, Robert?” Danforth asked.
“That it’s probably absurd,” Clayton answered. “Or at least exaggerated. Bannion doubts that it would even work. If the Germans carried out these executions, it’s possible that instead of squelching resistance, they would actually intensify it.”
“Then why tell us about it at all?” Anna asked, a question Danforth would consider many times over the coming years, sometimes convinced of its sincerity, other times equally convinced that she had always known the larger plot and her question was meant only to conceal that fact.
“Well, suppose you heard about it later,” Clayton answered. “Wouldn’t you wonder if a similar game was being played on you and Tom? Of course you would. So Bannion and I thought you should be informed.” He looked from Anna to Tom. “If either of you has any doubts about the Project, then now’s the time to pull out.”
Anna leaned forward slightly. “How much does Rache know about us?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Clayton assured her. “He’s focused entirely on Germany, on resistance to the Nazis in the homeland.” His smile was weak, but pointed. “And he may be quite paranoid at the moment. An underground Communist in Germany? Who wouldn’t be paranoid?”
There was an odd, suspended moment during which no one spoke, and it later seemed to Danforth that it was here that each of them had fully committed him- or herself to whatever lay ahead. It was as if they had been driving down a smooth road and had hit a bump; it might have diverted them, but it hadn’t. In a subtle but potentially corrosive way, the challenge had tested their confidence in each other but had not shaken it.
“So,” Clayton said after a moment, apparently reassured that the Project was not in danger, “tell me about Gurs.”
They told him what they’d found there and that they planned to visit other camps. They would make a quick assessment, then begin the process of contacting and organizing this army of the dispossessed.
Their report was quite thorough, Danforth thought, but as they gave it, it seemed to him that Anna was unsettled, like water slowly beginning to simmer. In the early days of her training, she had viewed the prospect of living undercover, perhaps for a very extended period, as an integral part of the Project. But since Gurs, she’d seemed uneasy and perhaps even anxious; Danforth felt she was now running on a different, and more rapid, timetable than he or Clayton, and this he found disturbing. Surely at this point, the Project required patience.
“All right,” Clayton said at the end of their briefing. “So we will move forward according to plan.” He took a long draw on the cigarette, then snapped up the menu with what struck Danforth as his old, youthful energy. “For your information, my dear friends, the Savoy is said to have the best steak Diane in London.”
There was no more talk of spies and conspiracies, of hundreds who might be sacrificed in the east, and anyone watching the three of them for the remainder of that evening would have seen nothing beyond friends enjoying themselves. Clayton spoke of his new job in London; he was working at the British Museum, a post he had gotten on his own merit, he said, rather than through his family’s name or money, a feat of which he seemed quite proud. He had always had it easy, he said, and so had yearned for what he called “some hard slogging” through which he might prove himself.
During it all, Anna seemed guarded. She watched Clayton as if she were unsure he was the man he seemed to be, and the attitude caused Danforth to wonder if his earlier sense that everyone’s trust had been renewed had been premature.
It was a look that urged Danforth to feel the same, and so after Anna went up to her room, he suggested that he and Clayton have drinks at the bar. Clayton immediately agreed, and for the next two hours Danforth tried to get Clayton drunk without getting drunk himself. Clayton had ultimately noticed that Danforth wasn’t holding up his end, however, and he had stopped drinking.
Was that suspicious? Danforth asked himself. Was it suspicious, or was Clayton just a man who didn’t want to get sloshed while his friend was quite obviously staying sober?
Danforth didn’t know, and thought he would never know, and so at around midnight he returned to his room, slept the sleep of wolves, and the next morning had breakfast in the stately hotel dining room and then took a stroll around London that took him to Trafalgar Square, then across it and down Whitehall all the way to Parliament, a route he would take many times in the years to come, always with an eye to encountering something that might shed light on the mystery that both illuminated and darkened the middle years of his life, a time when, as he later reminded himself, he might have been making money and establishing a family, as Clayton had.
Back at the hotel around noon, he went directly to Anna’s room.
She opened the door to him; she’d just showered, and her body was wrapped in a loose-fitting robe, her hair in a towel.
“Tom, come in.”
She padded barefoot across the floor to the bathroom, and Danforth suddenly imagined her dangling those same feet off the side of an iron bed at Ellis Island, and with that thought, he felt something tragic at the heart of things, that life was dark and entangling, everyone struggling helplessly in its invisible web.
“When are we going back to Paris?” Anna called from behind her bathroom door.
“Whenever you want,” Danforth answered.
“Tomorrow t
hen,” Anna said.
A moment passed before the door opened and she came out, dressed in a white blouse and long black skirt, into the tiny living room.
“You look . . . beautiful,” he said.
She glanced away, almost shyly, as if this were a remark to which she could find no way to respond. “Did you have lunch?”
“No,” Danforth said. “Shall we go down?”
She shook her head. “No, let’s eat here.”
With that she retrieved a bag from a nearby table.
“There was a little market,” she said. “I bought some things.”
They were modest, the items she’d purchased: a loaf of bread, some local cheese, a few squares of chocolate whose sweetness he would — along with a thousand other sensations ineffably joined with her — all his life remember.
While he ate he spoke of his long walk through London, the bookstalls of Charing Cross, the whirling traffic of Trafalgar. She had clearly made no effort to see the city, and he wondered why this was, and even suggested that they remain a day or two in London before returning to France.
“No,” she said, “I’ll go back tomorrow.”
She clearly meant that she would do this with or without Danforth, and because of that, he felt himself at a remove from any possibility of her affection; he was a man who had a specific purpose and who was, beyond that purpose, expendable.
“Then we’ll leave for Dover tomorrow,” he said.
Which they did, then crossed the Channel on a peaceful sea. On the crossing, Danforth thought of the Spanish armada, and spoke of it to Anna, how the grand ambitions of a Spanish king had sunk beneath these very waves. From this observation, he had gone on to wonder if Germany might one day hazard such a crossing and perhaps, luckily for the British, meet the same fate.
She had listened to all of this attentively, and he finally decided that she did not consider him pedantic, as Cecilia probably had, though she’d made a valiant effort to conceal it.
Still he said, “I’m going on. You should stop me.”
“I would if I wanted to,” she told him, then asked if he’d ever heard of the Divine Wind.
He hadn’t, and so she told him that an earlier armada, this one launched by Kublai Khan, had attempted the conquest of Japan. A storm, not unlike the one that had sunk the ships of King Philip, had spelled doom for this armada too, a divine intervention the Japanese had immortalized and yearly celebrated as a Divine Wind.
“My mother told me that story,” Anna said when she finished it.
This mention clearly summoned emotions she did not want, so she looked away, out toward the far shores of France, a retreat he had seen before and that, rather than putting him off, inexplicably drew him to her.
“After dinner, I had drinks with Clayton,” he told her at one point. “I didn’t see anything that told me if Clayton was playing some game. I wish I’d found some sign to read. But if one was there, I couldn’t read it.”
Neither spoke for a time, and during that interval Danforth worked to reassess the situation in which he found himself: heading back to France with Anna, but with no clear activity in mind save at some point secreting supplies for an army of interned Spaniards. Anna now seemed to have waning interest in the mission, so he felt compelled to reawaken it.
“We’ll need to work out supply routes that are off the beaten track,” he said.
And so for the next few minutes, they spoke of the original plan, a conversation during which Danforth realized that Anna had practically memorized the entire map of France: where each road led and through which villages, along with the routes of all the rivers, particularly the ones that emptied into the sea. It was as if she were plotting some enormous evacuation.
After that, she seemed reluctant to speak at all, her silences so long and grave Danforth later wondered if she had already embarked on a far different project, one whose dark route and fatal end she had decided long ago.
“So,” Danforth said jokingly, by way of testing those waters, “maybe we will change the world.”
Anna shook her head. “No,” she said. “We are just little spies.”
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Little spies.
There would be times in the future, Danforth said, when he would ask himself if this remark had moved Anna deeper into a plot she’d already begun to contemplate, or if it was from that grim conclusion that the plot had taken wing. Or perhaps the grave conspiracy that had sealed his fate had never been anything but a shadow plot whose goal had been to keep him utterly in the dark.
“Little spies,” Danforth repeated now, in a way that suggested he had many times turned this same sentence over in his mind. “We’re guided through life by a mirror ball,” he said. “With only little flashes to light our way.” He suddenly appeared captured by a distant terror, and he said, “The world was on fire, Paul. And Anna seemed to feel that we were doing nothing to put it out. She didn’t say it outright, but I could see it building in her mind.” He was silent for a time, then he said, “Bannion believed that her mind worked like a mosaic: shards of this or that, illuminated here or there, but at last forming a brilliant pattern. He believed that to the very end.”
“The end of what?”
“His life,” Danforth answered casually. “By then he had nothing but contempt for me.”
“Contempt? Why?”
Danforth smiled softly. “Because he thought I was a lovesick fool.” He drew in a long, troubled breath. “And it was true, Paul,” he said. “I had quite proven that by then.” He laughed gently at what he now seemed to regard as a sad fantasy. “I remember how Bannion once shook his head and looked at me as if I’d never be able to understand real commitment. ‘With you,’ he said, ‘it was always her.’ Which was true, and which I became aware of after Christophe.”
“After Christophe?” I asked.
“Yes,” Danforth said. “Because quite by accident he came back into the story. Not with any fanfare, but like fifth business in an opera. The little thing that moves a big thing, and sets even bigger things into motion. With Christophe, it was just a chance meeting in Paris, but it changed everything.”
Paris, France, 1939
“Bonjour, Thomas.”
Danforth turned and saw Christophe, typically bedraggled, moving toward him holding a package covered in brown paper and tied with string.
“I spend a lot of time in the park now,” he said. “It’s big enough to hide in.”
“Why are you hiding?” Danforth asked.
“I am the new Marat,” Christophe said with a self-deprecating laugh.
For a moment his eyes softened, and something in them revealed the little boy he had once been, no doubt the most restless and idiosyncratic in his class, doomed by his own nervous energy and incapacity to conform, so that he now seemed as pitiable as Marat must have, a denizen of the city’s sewers.
He indicated the ragged package beneath his arm. “It’s my book,” he said. “It’s about my time in Spain.”
He suddenly became surprisingly talkative, relating tales of combat (a bullet in the thigh in Madrid, shattered ribs when a caisson had rolled over him during the retreat toward the Pyrenees). As he continued, Danforth found himself liking the man more and more, for he was one of those people who could narrate stories of his own self-sacrifice and personal courage in a manner that was comically self-mocking. The bullet in the leg had been his own fault for trying to piss out of view of a young nun. The caisson had rolled over him because he’d dropped his ration of bread, bent down to retrieve it, been butted in the ass by an irritated burro, and from there had slid down a pebbly slope and into the path (talk about bad timing!) of the rolling caisson. He was essentially destitute, and his faith in Communism was all but childlike, but he was also generous and funny, and to these qualities he had added courage and commitment and a willingness to sacrifice his life for the great ideal of unifying mankind beneath the fluttering banner of the International Brigade
s.
“Would you like to read my book?” Christophe asked.
Danforth saw that Christophe thought him a man of taste and perhaps even some influence in literary circles. To decline to read his book would obviously dishearten him, and Danforth could find no way to refuse the request.
“Of course,” he said.
Christophe handed over the manuscript. “You must tell me your true opinion.”
After that they talked of nothing in particular, each careful not to mention the trip to Gurs, the Spaniards interned there, any hint of the Project.
They parted a few minutes later, and Danforth would always remember the slump of Christophe’s shoulders as he walked away, how they had seemed barely to support the frayed little coat he wore.
Once back in his room, Danforth sat down and began to read Christophe’s manuscript. The French he found there was barely grammatical, imbued with faults and misspellings that betrayed the rudimentary nature of the author’s education.
As he continued to read, Danforth came to feel Christophe’s many deprivations, how much he had been shaped by want and inflamed by the prospect of relieving it. There was a starry-eyed quality to his social analysis that imagined opera houses in the vineyards and concerts in the mines. Christophe believed in Man as religious people believed in God, every word directed toward the achievement of what he called, with awkward if typical hyperbole, “a human heaven where the unshod walk in the clouds and from that height don’t look down on others.”
It was early evening before Danforth finished the book, and in need of a walk after so long a session, he decided to return it to its author. During the walk, he thought not at all of the odd conversation he’d earlier had with Christophe, his talk of being the new Marat and that he was in hiding; in the coming years, Danforth would find himself amazed at his utter failure to recognize the signs of peril. On that day, as he would many times recall, he’d felt not a twinge of alarm as he entered the dark corridor that led to Christophe’s garret, nor was he concerned by the fact that when he reached it, the door was slightly ajar. After knocking softly and calling out Christophe’s name, he had, quite without dread, stepped inside.