~ * ~
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 te
rrace 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.