In later years, Danforth would hear his argument with the sad amusement of an old man confronting the young one he’d once been, and each time he did so, he would remember that Clayton had not once betrayed any feeling for Anna or given the slightest indication that he expected her to survive her mission, whatever it was. Because of that, as his mind careened from villain to villain, Danforth would forever wonder if Clayton had always known that, whether on this mission or the next, Anna would find a way to die.
“What about Cecilia?” Clayton asked.
“That’s already settled.”
This seemed genuinely to surprise Clayton but also to move him one step farther toward considering Danforth’s proposition.
“Anna is not some little spy,” Clayton said. “What we have in mind is a large effort. We’re not talking about her sitting around with a wireless, tapping out messages. There will be a lot of movement. Difficult logistics, once the operation is afoot.” He looked at Danforth very seriously. “You could be killed.”
Danforth realized that only a few weeks before, he would not have been able to tell if this was a genuine warning or just one of Clayton’s inflations.
“I know,” Danforth said.
Clayton studied him a moment. “I’ll talk to Bannion,” he said. “He was the one who actually thought of the Project. He has a right to have some say in what I decide.”
“I understand,” Danforth told him.
With that, they walked back to Clayton’s car and said goodbye to each other. Danforth returned to the house, took a seat at the small table where he and LaRoche and Anna had shared their first meal. Then in his mind he journeyed farther back, to the tavern where he’d first seen Anna, frantic and befuddled, a street grotesque in the making, and finally back to that first bit of conversation with Clayton, the small fuse he’d lit, which was now burning more brightly than he’d ever expected. How odd that his own good fortune could prove so hollow, he thought, that the life of a secret agent could attract him so, that for him the pursuit of happiness would seek its measure in the pursuit of peril, and that in this pursuit he would feel for this new life — as he suddenly realized he did —a surprisingly charged tingle of desire.
~ * ~
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Desire?
The curious emergence of this word in the context of his story must have been visible in my face, because Danforth suddenly grew very still, then said, “They are strange, the erotics of intrigue.”
The erotics of intrigue? I wondered if Danforth was now leading me into the boudoir of his mind.
“I would sometimes imagine myself endlessly strolling the old streets of Gion at dusk,” Danforth continued, “forever strolling among the geisha and the maiko.”
“When would you feel this?” I asked.
“In the prisons and on the trains,” Danforth said. “When I thought of her.”
“Of Anna?”
He was clearly reaching for something whose touch still pained him.
“Geisha means ‘artist’ in Japanese,” he said.
For a moment he seemed to dissolve into his own memory. “Love as performance, as something . . . acted.”
It was obvious to me that this was too sensitive a subject for anyone but Danforth alone to pursue, and so I said nothing.
“The ‘smile of smiles,’ Blake called it,” Danforth added. “It’s where love and deception meet.”
After this, he fell silent for a time. Then, quite surprisingly, he smiled. “Tell me, Paul, have you ever seen North by Northwest?”
This question, along with his abrupt change in mood, sent my mind spinning. “The old Hitchcock movie?” I asked. “The one with Cary Grant?”
“Yes,” Danforth said. His tone took on a slight eeriness, as if his story had now become one of strange occurrences, though the sort that were more ironic than supernatural, the freakishness of real life. “It happened just like that.” He nodded in the general direction of the club’s entrance. “Right there.”
~ * ~
Century Club, New York City, 1939
The rain had begun just as Danforth stepped out of the Century Club. He didn’t have an umbrella, and so he turned to the left, toward Fifth Avenue, planning to sprint to the corner, find a shop, buy an umbrella. That was when he felt a grip on his arm that was sharper than any he had ever known; when he looked down toward the grasp that held him, he half expected to see black talons rather than a hand. Then he felt a similar grip on his other arm.
He saw two men, one on either side of him.
“Don’t speak,” the man to his left said gruffly. He was dressed in a dark blue double-breasted suit and wore a gray fedora. “You’re dead if you do.”
The second man wore a brown suit, also double-breasted, but no hat. He nodded toward a car that idled beside the curb just at the club’s entrance. A third man, this one in a dark green single-breasted suit and wearing a brown hat, had already opened the door and seemed to be grimly awaiting Danforth’s decision.
“Move forward and don’t speak,” the man in the fedora said.
The one in the brown suit tightened his grip but then added a slight, surprisingly warm smile. “You’re too young to die, Mr. Danforth.”
It was dread, and dread alone, that swept over Danforth in what he would always remember as an intense wave of heat that emptied and confused him and in an instant sucked away his will to resist these men. It was as if the sun had suddenly focused all its fiery blast upon the tiny puddle of himself, leaving him dry and dusty, and strangely dead to any sense of himself other than the physical. He was no longer mind or heart. He was only the body that encased his life, which was in dire peril.
“Move,” the man in the dark blue suit said sharply.
Almost without willing it, Danforth drifted forward like a dazed creature floating in the aftermath of some shock, and seconds later he was seated snugly between the men who’d grabbed him, the man in the green suit at the wheel.
He had not spoken, and this muteness surprised him. He felt like a child between two enormously imposing and unstable parents, unable to question what they did or in any way predict their behavior.
The car headed north on Broadway, and as it moved, Danforth strung enough of his senses together to begin to contemplate the silent, stern-faced men between whom he was tightly wedged. Who were they? What were they after? Was he being kidnapped? He briefly tried to guess what his father’s reaction might be to that first phone call, how much ransom he might actually pay. This idea gave way to the equally far-fetched notion that this bizarre abduction might be the result of some business dispute of his father’s. The elder Danforth often handled people quite roughly, so it seemed possible that some dissatisfied client or subcontractor might have decided that the usual avenues of redress against his father’s high-handedness were far too slow and uncertain.
Then, quite suddenly, it became obvious that both of these surmises were dead wrong. It was then and only then that he thought of the Project and considered the possibility that the fear Bannion had expressed and LaRoche had later seconded had been justified all along, that they were truly out there, these American storm troopers, and that Danforth was now in their hands.