I was still considering these many possibilities when Danforth’s question brought me up short.
“You’ve never killed anyone, have you, Paul?”
He asked this casually, as he might have asked if I’d ever eaten duck confit or sipped Meursault.
“Killed anyone?” I was obviously taken aback by the question. “No, I’ve never killed anyone.”
“I didn’t think so,” Danforth said.
So was Danforth’s tale a murder story? I wondered now.
“Have you?” I asked him, hesitantly.
“Oh, sure,” Danforth answered calmly, revealing no sense of regret at having done so.
“Really?”
“Well, there was a war, after all,” Danforth said.
“Oh, you mean in the war,” I said with rather obvious relief. “Of course.”
“I remember one fellow,” Danforth went on in the same breezy tone, as if he were relating the story of a camping trip in the Berkshires. “A British intelligence officer. He’d tracked this Nazi bastard to a hunting lodge in Bavaria. He knew his crimes. The Nazi tried to explain himself, tell him why he’d done what he’d done, but in the end, he couldn’t keep that mask in place, and with all the contempt in the world, he sneered at my British friend.” He lifted his hand to get the waiter’s attention, then quite casually, he added, “So the Brit shot him right between the eyes.” He laughed. “The British did a lot of that sort of thing after the war, you know. We wanted trials, we Americans. We wanted due process. But not the Brits. They shot those Nazi bastards wherever they found them. They shot them in barns and animal stalls. They shot them in the woods and on deserted roads. They shot them in their little town squares and dragged them out of basements and root cellars and caves and shot them in broad daylight, with their fat wives and little milkmaid daughters looking on.” His laugh was surprisingly brutal. “There are certain things a human being cannot do and still expect another human being to let him live.” He looked at me with the weariness born of this conclusion. “For certain crimes, there should be no protection. Even love, as they say, must have an end.”
I found something curiously touching in this last remark, perhaps because it had been so hard won, given the failure of the plot, how heart-struck he’d been by Anna, their one night of passion, her capture the next day, Bannion’s too, then Danforth’s own escape, along with whatever dark and bloody things he’d known after that, a whole world at war. It made for the grave mosaic one saw in his face and that returned me to his time.
And yet, suddenly, he laughed. “The Old Bulldog,” he said. “It was Churchill who wanted them shot without trial, you know, those Nazi bastards. He had been in a war, you see. Roosevelt had not. Do you think that might have made the difference?”
“That, along with the fact that England had been terribly hurt and we hadn’t been,” I said.
“The Germans would have flattened the whole of England if they could have,” Danforth said. “And even as it was, Canterbury Cathedral was lost and much of London was in ruins.” He shook his head. “To see the fires burning in your own land. That fills a man with rage. And add to the bombings those other German crimes. The camps and the pits. Those bulldozers.” Something in his soul appeared to sour. “We should have killed them all, don’t you think, Paul?”
“I can certainly understand the rage,” I said, then added a short, admittedly nervous laugh. “Of course, my father would never have been born.”
“Nor you,” Danforth said, “So it was good for you that something stayed our hand.”
I felt a chill, as if a wintry blast had stopped me. “Yes,” I said, then glanced at my notes to avoid the icy probing of Danforth’s eyes. “So, I suppose you left Munich that day?”
“I left Germany that day,” Danforth said.
The events of that morning returned to me, Anna’s capture, Danforth’s attempt at suicide, the evidence that would have been found on him had he succeeded.
“Anna’s scarf,” I said suddenly. “What did you do with it?”
“I left it in my room,” Danforth answered. “What, Paul, did you expect me to keep it as some sort of love token?”
“I suppose I did,” I admitted.
Danforth laughed. “You’ve seen too many movies.” He was quiet for a time, then he said, “I expected you to ask me about the cyanide.”
“What about it?”
“Why it didn’t work.”
“Yes, I should have asked about that.”
He waved his hand, “Not to worry. I was well on my way to England before I asked it myself. Sitting on the ferry, thinking everything through again. Not just the events of that last terrible day in Munich, but everything. Clayton’s first approach. Anna in the Old Town Bar. LaRoche. Bannion. Everything we’d shared and endured, all of which had come to nothing.” He shrugged. “And of course that last night with Anna. Then her arrest and Bannion’s. The fact that I wasn’t arrested at all. Then, suddenly, I thought of the cyanide, that it hadn’t worked.” He smiled. “It just came like a soft creak into my mind.”
I expected him to go on from there, follow the linear line of his tale, but he stopped instead, abruptly stopped, as if some quite different progress had suddenly occurred to him. Then, as if deciding to take an alternative route through well-known terrain, he said, “A soft creak. Yes, it came to me just like that.” He paused again, his eyes on his empty glass. “A soft creak,” he repeated. When he looked up at me, his eyes sparkled icily in the room’s dim light. “Like a nightingale floor.”
~ * ~
PART VI
The Nightingale Floor
~ * ~
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
The Japanese word was uguisubari, Danforth told me, a floor designed to make a chirping sound when anyone walked on it. “The sound of a nightingale,” he added.
Then another drink arrived, and he took a small sip before returning to the reference toward which, seconds before, his tale had abruptly careened.
“Any wooden floor will creak a little when it’s walked on, of course,” Danforth continued, “but in a nightingale floor, it’s not the wood that gives off a sound, it’s nails rubbing against clamps. That’s why the floor chirps rather than creaks.”
“Why would anyone want a chirping floor?” I asked.
“For security,” Danforth explained. “The floors were laid in hallways that led to conference rooms and the like. If anyone tried to creep close to the rooms, the nightingale floor would give off its distinctive call, and the people in council would be alerted to a spy or, perhaps, an assassin.”