“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 prais
e 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.”