The assembly was large but by no means filled the square. Deloncle was a fierce extremist, after all, not a figure of widespread adoration, as de Gaulle would later become. And as Danforth noted a few minutes later, even Prime Minister Daladier, for all his barrel-chested squatness, gave off a considerably more commanding physical presence than the man who now mounted a small platform to address the crowd.
So this is Deloncle, Danforth thought at this first glimpse.
Eugène Deloncle, dressed in a dark suit and wearing a bowler hat, looked more like a bank clerk than the founding member of a violent terrorist organization pledged to bring down the Third Republic. He demonstrated none of the Fascist posturing so much a part of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s public displays, and far from Léon Gambetta’s storied vocal range, his voice would have died a few yards from the platform had amplifiers not been set up to broadcast to the far reaches of the crowd. To offset the general ordinariness of his dress and bearing, he had added only a red rosebud that winked from his lapel and that seemed as out of place as a jewel in a mound of earth.
It was a day for flags, all of them French and all of them waving as Deloncle addressed the crowd. He began with a recitation of the many failures of the present government. Danforth had read excerpts of Deloncle’s speeches, and this one was no different from those, save that the speaker seemed more certain that his dire predictions would come to pass, the inevitable war doubtless the harbinger of a great struggle through which the many enemies of France would get what had long been coming to them. First among the villains he named were Communists and Jews, whom he seemed to think one and the same.
The speech went on for half an hour, the crowd cheering repeatedly as Deloncle continued his attack, his rhetoric growing more vehement with each burst of applause until finally he seemed to drown in his own vitriol and, in a kind of emotional exhaustion, turned the microphone over to another speaker.
The entire rally lasted only a few minutes longer, and once it was done, the crowd dispersed more quickly than Danforth had expected, most of them strolling to the many cafes along the square.
Anna watched them go for a time, then said something Danforth had never expected and found extraordinary.
“It’s too late for the Project,” she said. “And it was never enough anyway.”
“Never enough to what?” Danforth asked.
“To matter,” Anna said.
She looked at him in a way that made him suddenly recall a night in Paris, how he’d left her apartment and walked across the square at Saint-Germain-des-Pres, and then stopped, glanced up, and noticed her silhouette in the window. He’d thought then, and it returned to him now, that she had all her life been intent upon some purpose, that her current situation was merely the implementation of that long-imagined act.
“Then what do you propose?” Danforth asked.
“I don’t know,” Anna admitted.
For the first time, she seemed at sea, as if some earlier certainty had been taken from her. She was silent for a time, then, as they slowly walked the square, she began to question not only the Project but any other scheme that would reduce her to a “little spy.” If war broke out, what good would it do to send reports of this troop movement or that when the point was to stop those movements? In the same vein, what would be the point of blowing up a bridge or mangling railway tracks? Another bridge would soon replace it, and mangled tracks could be taken up and replaced within hours. And finally, what was the point of waiting for the war to begin at all?
Her expression changed then in a way that Danforth would often think of in the coming years. He would remember how she’d drawn in a long breath, as if undecided about how to voice the idea that had come to her; apparently anticipating that it would be thought absurd, she’d broached the topic at a slant.
“When I was a little girl, we had a nice garden,” she said. “I often played in it. One day, a snake came into the garden. My father killed it with a hoe. He showed me the remains of the snake, picking up the head in one hand and the body in the other. ‘To kill a snake,’ he told me, ‘you must chop off the head.”‘
She paused, as if the conclusion she’d just come to had stopped her cold. “Do you understand what I mean, Tom?”
He did not understand, and so he simply looked at her, quite baffled.
Very deliberately she added, “I saw a picture of him in Prague. He rides in an open touring car.”
Suddenly, Danforth saw the unreality, the sheer absurdity, of what she was getting at.
“Hitler?” he asked in an astonished whisper.
She nodded but added nothing else. Danforth saw immediately that he was trapped: either doomed to be a little spy or compelled to reach for something larger than he’d ever dreamed of. The latter prospect seemed so fantastical and at the same time so alluring that he felt its dark attraction as a kind of lust.
~ * ~
Century Club, New York City, 2001
“Lust?” I asked.
Danforth nodded. “A lust to matter. To do something that mattered.”
“But surely you knew that what Anna was proposing was completely insane,” I said, no less stunned by Anna’s suggestion than Danforth must have been when he first heard it.
“Insane, yes,” Danforth admitted. “And to think that the idea began to germinate practically within sight of that little Fascist Deloncle.” He took a sip from his glass. “It was the Gestapo who killed him, by the way.”
“The Gestapo?” I asked. “Why would the Germans want Deloncle dead?”
“He had gotten a little too close to the Abwehr,” Danforth answered. “There was always a great rivalry between Hitler and the German army.”
With this, Danforth dismissed any further discussion of Eugène Deloncle’s death.
“But we had taken a step,” Danforth said. “And I have to confess that for all the fear and dread, there was also a feeling of. . . passion. Very physical. It was as if a beautiful woman had walked into the room, strolled over to me, slipped a knife into my hand, nodded toward some fat old minister of state, and whispered, ‘Kill him and I’m yours.’”
I stared at Danforth, genuinely aghast that a history-transforming act could be reduced to so primitive an instinct.
“That’s what you must factor in, Paul, the narcotic effect of plotting a stupendous act,” Danforth added. “It produces a kind of sustained ecstasy.”
I couldn’t help but wonder how long Danforth had felt the erotic effects of this narcotic before reality swept in and set him straight.
“Ecstasy, yes,” Danforth said, and with those words returned to his story, more tensely and a little more fearfully. But was it the fear a soldier might have as he moved into a region where enemy forces lurked? Or was it the fear of some old Lothario as he opened the door of a murderess’s boudoir?
“Ecstasy, but also terror at the very thought of what was in our minds,” Danforth said. His smile seemed to reflect the fate he’d glimpsed at that moment long ago. “But I knew that, despite all that, I would see it through to the end.” He glanced away, then back at me. “Strange, Paul, but for the rest of my life, when I thought of that moment,” he added softly, “I would recall the scent of almonds.”