“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 terrace 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.
“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.”