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.”
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.”