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 le
ss 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.
~ * ~
The Savoy, London, 1939
“They once flooded the lobby, you know,” Clayton said in what struck Danforth as a strained effort at his old gaiety. “They filled it with water, and the patrons floated in little gondolas.” He shook his head. “It’s hard to imagine now,” he added. “Such . . . frivolity.”
Danforth found Clayton’s uncharacteristic solemnity worrisome. It was clearly a sign that certain things weren’t going well, though in what way they weren’t going well remained obscure. One thing was obvious, however. Clayton was no longer enjoying his role as lead conspirator; as he sat in suit and tie, dressed as perfectly as ever, he seemed like a portrait darkening at the edges.
“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 official.” 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.
D
uring 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?
The Quest for Anna Klein Page 14