~ * ~
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 less 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.”