The room was dimly lighted, and the curtains were tightly drawn, but as he moved farther into the room Danforth saw the unmade bed, single chair, and desk scattered with papers. Christophe had placed a few family photographs on the nearby mantel, pictures that revealed the humble nature of his origins as well as a view of the Normandy landscape in which he had grown up. There was a stack of newspapers by his desk, and a bookshelf that bore exactly what Danforth would have expected: French translations of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and a collection of Stalin’s speeches.
From where he stood, near the center of the room, Danforth could see into the tiny bathroom. A plain green curtain hung from a metal bar over the bathtub.
It was then he saw it, a streak of blood that ran down the side of the tub and pooled at its base, a sight that both chilled and captivated him, making him move toward it in exactly the way of a man in a movie melodrama, slowly but steadily, as if in response to music in the background.
Century Club, New York City, 2001
“Like a spy-picture soundtrack,” Danforth said. “Very moody. Not that Greek tinkle you hear in The Third Man. But very dark and moody. A sustained C, maybe an augmented chord . . .”
“Wait!” I blurted.
Danforth looked at me, perplexed by my sudden outburst.
“What happened to Christophe?” I demanded.
“He’d been murdered,” Danforth answered. “A bullet in his head. I later tracked down the weapon. It was German, a nine-millimeter Mauser. Years later, I found out that Christophe had been in contact with something called the Red Orchestra, a group of Communist students based in Berlin, and that he’d made frequent trips to Copenhagen, where he’d also established contacts. All his contacts were young, and almost all of them were dead by the end of the war.”
The details Danforth had gathered on such a minor figure in his story surprised me. It also generated a question.
“Did you track down the fate of everyone you were involved with?”
“Yes,” Danforth answered. “Because I needed to find out what had actually happened, you see. I needed to find out what Anna had done. But more, I needed to find out why she had done it. Because Bannion was right in what he said to me. It was always her.”
A wave of barely suppressed emotion swept over him; he fought it in a way that had by then become familiar, a quick retreat into an academic tone.
“Have you ever been to Orléans, Paul?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“It’s quite a lovely city to the southwest of Paris,” Danforth said. “Anna and I went there after Christophe’s murder. We were, I suppose, on the run. We knew we had to get out of Paris, but we had no idea where we should go, so we went to Orléans. The idea was to keep on the move. I thought it would be good practice once the war broke out.” He smiled. “But as it turned out, Orléans was our last stop in France.”
Orléans, France, 1939
She crossed the street that day at the height of noon, and Dan-forth would forever after recall that in that bright summer sun, with the grand façade of the old train station behind her, she had seemed the most improbable of spies. She had none of the studied exoticism of Mata Hari, nothing flamboyant or bejeweled. She looked like someone’s daughter or someone’s sister or someone’s wife. The trappings of the courtesan would have embarrassed her, and Danforth could not imagine her the mistress of some powerful military or government offi cial, gathering se crets revealed during boudoir encounters, passing them on in packets sealed with red wax.
And yet, at that galvanizing moment, Danforth found himself drawn to her as he had never been drawn to any woman before or would be after; through all the passing years, he would hear the click of her heels upon the cobblestones of Orléans and see her eyes searching for him among the assembling throng; he’d remember her sudden, sweet look of recognition when she saw him, followed by her pulling back from whatever regard for him, romantic or otherwise, she’d so briefly revealed.
“Is he still planning to be here?” she asked in French.
She meant Deloncle, who was scheduled to appear at a rally in this, his hometown.
“Yes,” Danforth told her. “At Place du Martroi.”
Place du Martroi was a large square, the town’s central meeting place. The Hôtel de Ville rested at its far end, with the rest of the square bordered by the stately, powder-white façades common to government buildings. Ninety years before, an equestrian statue of Joan of Arc had been commissioned by the town. It showed the Maid of Orléans in full military garb. Anna paused to look at it. She did not appear to identify with Joan or think herself a force in history, and yet something in the way she stopped and gazed on the statue would return to Danforth many times, Anna not as a vision of the female warrior on the march but as a woman contemplating with a certain sympathy the visionary madness of a deluded girl.
The assembly was large but by no means filled the square. Deloncle was a fierce extremist, after all, not a figure of widespread adoration, as de Gaulle would later become. And as Danforth noted a few minutes later, even Prime Minister Daladier, for all his barrel-chested squatness, gave off a considerably more commanding physical presence than the man who now mounted a small platform to address the crowd.
So this is Deloncle, Danforth thought at this first glimpse.
Eugène Deloncle, dressed in a dark suit and wearing a bowler hat, looked more like a bank clerk than the founding member of a violent terrorist organization pledged to bring down the Third Republic. He demonstrated none of the Fascist posturing so much a part of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s public displays, and far from Léon Gambetta’s storied vocal range, his voice would have died a few yards from the platform had amplifiers not been set up to broadcast to the far reaches of the crowd. To offset the general ordinariness of his dress and bearing, he had added only a red rosebud that winked from his lapel and that seemed as out of place as a jewel in a mound of earth.
It was a day for flags, all of them French and all of them waving as Deloncle addressed the crowd. He began with a recitation of the many failures of the present government. Danforth had read excerpts of Deloncle’s speeches, and this one was no different from those, save that the speaker seemed more certain that his dire predictions would come to pass, the inevitable war doubtless the harbinger of a great struggle through which the many enemies of France would get what had long been coming to them. First among the villains he named were Communists and Jews, whom he seemed to think one and the same.
The speech went on for half an hour, the crowd cheering repeatedly as Deloncle continued his attack, his rhetoric growing more vehement with each burst of applause until finally he seemed to drown in his own vitriol and, in a kind of emotional exhaustion, turned the microphone over to another speaker.
The entire rally lasted only a few minutes longer, and once it was done, the crowd dispersed more quickly than Danforth had expected, most of them strolling to the many cafés along the square.
Anna watched them go for a time, then said something Danforth had never expected and found extraordinary.
“It’s too late for the Project,” she said. “And it was never enough anyway.”
“Never enough to what?” Danforth asked.
“To matter,” Anna said.
She looked at him in a way that made him suddenly recall a night in Paris, how he’d left her apartment and walked across the square at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and then stopped, glanced up, and noticed her silhouette in the window. He’d thought then, and it returned to him now, that she had all her life been intent upon some purpose, that her current situation was merely the implementation of that long-imagined act.
“Then what do you propose?” Danforth asked.
“I don’t know,” Anna admitted.
For the first time, she seemed at sea, as if some earlier certainty had been taken from her. She was silent for a time, then, as they slowly walked the square, she began to question not only the Project but any other scheme that woul
d reduce her to a “little spy.” If war broke out, what good would it do to send reports of this troop movement or that when the point was to stop those movements? In the same vein, what would be the point of blowing up a bridge or mangling railway tracks? Another bridge would soon replace it, and mangled tracks could be taken up and replaced within hours. And finally, what was the point of waiting for the war to begin at all?
Her expression changed then in a way that Danforth would often think of in the coming years. He would remember how she’d drawn in a long breath, as if undecided about how to voice the idea that had come to her; apparently anticipating that it would be thought absurd, she’d broached the topic at a slant.
“When I was a little girl, we had a nice garden,” she said. “I often played in it. One day, a snake came into the garden. My father killed it with a hoe. He showed me the remains of the snake, picking up the head in one hand and the body in the other. ‘To kill a snake,’ he told me, ‘you must chop off the head.’”
She paused, as if the conclusion she’d just come to had stopped her cold. “Do you understand what I mean, Tom?”
He did not understand, and so he simply looked at her, quite baffl ed.
Very deliberately she added, “I saw a picture of him in Prague. He rides in an open touring car.”
Suddenly, Danforth saw the unreality, the sheer absurdity, of what she was getting at.
“Hitler?” he asked in an astonished whisper.
She nodded but added nothing else. Danforth saw immediately that he was trapped: either doomed to be a little spy or compelled to reach for something larger than he’d ever dreamed of. The latter prospect seemed so fantastical and at the same time so alluring that he felt its dark attraction as a kind of lust.
Century Club, New York City, 2001
“Lust?” I asked.
Danforth nodded. “A lust to matter. To do something that mattered.”
“But surely you knew that what Anna was proposing was completely insane,” I said, no less stunned by Anna’s suggestion than Danforth must have been when he first heard it.
“Insane, yes,” Danforth admitted. “And to think that the idea began to germinate practically within sight of that little Fascist Deloncle.” He took a sip from his glass. “It was the Gestapo who killed him, by the way.”
“The Gestapo?” I asked. “Why would the Germans want Deloncle dead?”
“He had gotten a little too close to the Abwehr,” Danforth answered. “There was always a great rivalry between Hitler and the German army.”
With this, Danforth dismissed any further discussion of Eugène Deloncle’s death.
“But we had taken a step,” Danforth said. “And I have to confess that for all the fear and dread, there was also a feeling of . . . passion. Very physical. It was as if a beautiful woman had walked into the room, strolled over to me, slipped a knife into my hand, nodded toward some fat old minister of state, and whispered, ‘Kill him and I’m yours.’”
I stared at Danforth, genuinely aghast that a history-transforming act could be reduced to so primitive an instinct.
“That’s what you must factor in, Paul, the narcotic effect of plotting a stupendous act,” Danforth added. “It produces a kind of sustained ecstasy.”
I couldn’t help but wonder how long Danforth had felt the erotic effects of this narcotic before reality swept in and set him straight.
“Ecstasy, yes,” Danforth said, and with those words returned to his story, more tensely and a little more fearfully. But was it the fear a soldier might have as he moved into a region where enemy forces lurked? Or was it the fear of some old Lothario as he opened the door of a murderess’s boudoir?
“Ecstasy, but also terror at the very thought of what was in our minds,” Danforth said. His smile seemed to reflect the fate he’d glimpsed at that moment long ago. “But I knew that, despite all that, I would see it through to the end.” He glanced away, then back at me. “Strange, Paul, but for the rest of my life, when I thought of that moment,” he added softly, “I would recall the scent of almonds.”
PART IV
The Scent of Almonds
Century Club, New York City, 2001
“Why almonds?” I asked.
“Because that is the odor of cyanide,” Danforth said, and then he glanced around like a man either recalling the place where a murder had been committed or looking for a place where one might be carried out.
“We should leave here now, I think,” he said.
I looked toward the window. “But it’s still snowing quite hard,” I warned him.
He smiled at a young man’s alarm that an old one should venture out in such weather. “I have learned to be sure-footed,” he said. His face took on that familiar expression of an old man teaching a young one the rules of the road. “What do you think is the most important characteristic of a predator?” he asked.
I thought of the spider, still and silent in its web. “Patience,” I answered.
Danforth smiled. “Very good. And what is the prey’s most important characteristic?”
I shrugged. “I’m not sure.”
“Resignation,” Danforth said. “Which can only be achieved if the prey understands the purpose of its death.”
“You’re speaking in human terms then,” I said.
A hint of cruelty glittered in Danforth’s eyes. “I am speaking, Paul, of revenge.”
With that he rose in a way that made him seem already some what ghostly, a dark cloud, but a cloud nonetheless, as if he were no longer entirely alive because at his great age he was so very near to death.
“Come,” he said. “I have a quiet spot in mind.”
The spot wasn’t very far, as it turned out, though we’d accumulated a fair amount of snow on the shoulders of our coats before we got there.
“The Blue Bar,” he said with a nod to the awning up ahead. “In the Algonquin Hotel. You must have heard of the Algonquin?”
“Yes, of course,” I said. “The Round Table. Those famous wits. Dorothy Parker and —”
“Yes, yes,” Danforth said sharply, as if all their worldly talk had never been worldly at all. “They were Manhattan provincials, and what could be more provincial than that?” He added a sly wink, but his tone turned somber. “Cleverness is the death of wisdom, Paul.”
We reached the bar, and rather than allowing me to do it, Danforth stepped briskly forward, opened the door, and let me enter first. It was an old man’s way of demonstrating that although he was old, he was not dependent, and I found myself admiring his determination to assert himself in such a graceful and unoffending manner.
“Thank you,” I said as I passed in front of him and gave him a courtly nod. “Most kind.”
Danforth smiled. “You are a very polite young man.” He said it as if he were suspicious of such formality, as if it were the knife inside the glove.
We took a table by the window, from which we could watch the city’s hardworking pedestrians shoulder through this inclement day in this wounded city, a scene that played in Danforth’s eyes and seemed, in the way of sorrow, to both darken and enlighten them.
“The tragic irony is that it is the people who seek heaven in the future who create hell in the present,” he said. With that, he summoned a waiter, and we each ordered a glass of wine, he a white, I a red, both whatever the house suggested.
“Tell me, Paul,” Danforth said once the waiter had departed. “Have you been to Moscow?”
“I have, actually,” I was pleased to tell him. “But a long time ago. When I was a little boy. On the grand tour I made with my grandfather. He knew the city quite well.”
“Really,” Danforth said. “Did he happen to show you the city’s swimming pool?”
“Swimming pool? No. It was the middle of winter.”
“Too bad,” Danforth said. “I don’t know this for a fact, but I can’t imagine that it isn’t the largest swimming pool in the world. And it has quite a history, that pool. Quite a story of its own.
”
And then he told it.
In the summer of 1931, he said, Pravda announced that the Palace of the Soviets was to be built in Moscow. The planned physical dimensions of this palace were stupendous. It was to be six times the size of the Empire State Building, and at its completion, it would be crowned with a gigantic statue of Lenin three times as high as the Statue of Liberty. This was Stalin’s answer to capitalism, and he intended it to be a very powerful one. Equally important to this aim, the Palace of the Soviets was to be built next to the Kremlin on the huge piece of real estate at that time occupied by the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, itself a monumental structure thirty stories tall with walls more than three meters thick and whose bronze cupola alone weighed 176 tons.
“All this, of course, had to be torn down before the Palace of the Soviets could be built,” Danforth said.
And so various methods for carrying out this destruction were endlessly discussed. It was even proposed that the building be bombed, but accuracy was a problem, and so during the course of a single night, a huge wooden barrier was erected around the cathedral, after which the interior of the church was stripped of a half a ton of gold, along with an incalculable treasure of diamonds, silver, topaz, amethyst, emeralds, and ornately carved enamels, all of which disappeared into government warehouses or the vaults of the Soviet secret police.
“The demolition was completed in early December,” Danforth said. “In four months one of the great architectural jewels of Moscow had been completely razed.”
Quest for Anna Klein, The Page 15