“Would you like to read my book?” Christophe asked.
Danforth saw that Christophe thought him a man of taste and perhaps even some influence in literary circles. To decline to read his book would obviously dishearten him, and Danforth could find no way to refuse the request.
“Of course,” he said.
Christophe handed over the manuscript. “You must tell me your true opinion.”
After that they talked of nothing in particular, each careful not to mention the trip to Gurs, the Spaniards interned there, any hint of the Project.
They parted a few minutes later, and Danforth would always remember the slump of Christophe’s shoulders as he walked away, how they had seemed barely to support the frayed little coat he wore.
Once back in his room, Danforth sat down and began to read Christophe’s manuscript. The French he found there was barely grammatical, imbued with faults and misspellings that betrayed the rudimentary nature of the author’s education.
As he continued to read, Danforth came to feel Christophe’s many deprivations, how much he had been shaped by want and inflamed by the prospect of relieving it. There was a starry-eyed quality to his social analysis that imagined opera houses in the vineyards and concerts in the mines. Christophe believed in Man as religious people believed in God, every word directed toward the achievement of what he called, with awkward if typical hyperbole, “a human heaven where the unshod walk in the clouds and from that height don’t look down on others.”
It was early evening before Danforth finished the book, and in need of a walk after so long a session, he decided to return it to its author. During the walk, he thought not at all of the odd conversation he’d earlier had with Christophe, his talk of being the new Marat and that he was in hiding; in the coming years, Danforth would find himself amazed at his utter failure to recognize the signs of peril. On that day, as he would many times recall, he’d felt not a twinge of alarm as he entered the dark corridor that led to Christophe’s garret, nor was he concerned by the fact that when he reached it, the door was slightly ajar. After knocking softly and calling out Christophe’s name, he had, quite without dread, stepped inside.
The room was dimly lighted, and the curtains were tightly drawn, but as he moved farther into the room Danforth saw the unmade bed, single chair, and desk scattered with papers. Christophe had placed a few family photographs on the nearby mantel, pictures that revealed the humble nature of his origins as well as a view of the Normandy landscape in which he had grown up. There was a stack of newspapers by his desk, and a bookshelf that bore exactly what Danforth would have expected: French translations of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and a collection of Stalin’s speeches.
From where he stood, near the center of the room, Danforth could see into the tiny bathroom. A plain green curtain hung from a metal bar over the bathtub.
It was then he saw it, a streak of blood that ran down the side of the tub and pooled at its base, a sight that both chilled and captivated him, making him move toward it in exactly the way of a man in a movie melodrama, slowly but steadily, as if in response to music in the background.
~ * ~
Century Club, New York City, 2001
“Like a spy-picture soundtrack,” Danforth said. “Very moody. Not that Greek tinkle you hear in The Third Man. But very dark and moody. A sustained C, maybe an augmented chord . . .”
“Wait!” I blurted.
Danforth looked at me, perplexed by my sudden outburst.
“What happened to Christophe?” I demanded.
“He’d been murdered,” Danforth answered. “A bullet in his head. I later tracked down the weapon. It was German, a nine-millimeter Mauser. Years later, I found out that Christophe had been in contact with something called the Red Orchestra, a group of Communist students based in Berlin, and that he’d made frequent trips to Copenhagen, where he’d also established contacts. All his contacts were young, and almost all of them were dead by the end of the war.”
The details Danforth had gathered on such a minor figure in his story surprised me. It also generated a question.
“Did you track down the fate of everyone you were involved with?”
“Yes,” Danforth answered. “Because I needed to find out what had actually happened, you see. I needed to find out what Anna had done. But more, I needed to find out why she had done it. Because Bannion was right in what he said to me. It was always her.”
A wave of barely suppressed emotion swept over him; he fought it in a way that had by then become familiar, a quick retreat into an academic tone.
“Have you ever been to Orléans, Paul?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“It’s quite a lovely city to the southwest of Paris,” Danforth said. “Anna and I went there after Christophe’s murder. We were, I suppose, on the run. We knew we had to get out of Paris, but we had no idea where we should go, so we went to Orléans. The idea was to keep on the move. I thought it would be good practice once the war broke out.” He smiled. “But as it turned out, Orléans was our last stop in France.”
~ * ~
Orléans, France, 1939
She crossed the street that day at the height of noon, and Danforth would forever after recall that in that bright summer sun, with the grand facade of the old train station behind her, she had seemed the most improbable of spies. She had none of the studied exoticism of Mata Hari, nothing flamboyant or bejeweled. She looked like someone’s daughter or someone’s sister or someone’s wife. The trappings of the courtesan would have embarrassed her, and Danforth could not imagine her the mistress of some powerful military or government official, gathering secrets revealed during boudoir encounters, passing them on in packets sealed with red wax.
And yet, at that galvanizing moment, Danforth found himself drawn to her as he had never been drawn to any woman before or would be after; through all the passing years, he would hear the click of her heels upon the cobblestones of Orléans and see her eyes searching for him among the assembling throng; he’d remember her sudden, sweet look of recognition when she saw him, followed by her pulling back from whatever regard for him, romantic or otherwise, she’d so briefly revealed.
“Is he still planning to be here?” she asked in French.
She meant Deloncle, who was scheduled to appear at a rally in this, his hometown.
“Yes,” Danforth told her. “At Place du Martroi.”
Place du Martroi was a large square, the town’s central meeting place. The Hotel de Ville rested at its far end, with the rest of the square bordered by the stately, powder-white facades common to government buildings. Ninety years before, an equestrian statue of Joan of Arc had been commissioned by the town. It showed the Maid of Orléans in full military garb. Anna paused to look at it. She did not appear to identify with Joan or think herself a force in history, and yet something in the way she stopped and gazed on the statue would return to Danforth many times, Anna not as a vision of the female warrior on the march but as a woman contemplating with a certain sympathy the visionary madness of a deluded girl.