“I’m so very sorry, Tom,” Clayton said.
Danforth found that beyond the three words he had already said, he could add only: “Are you sure?”
Clayton nodded. “According to my sources, she never betrayed you or Bannion or anything about the Project,” he added by way of consolation. “She was a heroic woman.” He was silent for a moment, then he said, “It was Rache who betrayed us.”
Rache, Danforth thought. In German it meant “vengeance,” and at that moment the need for vengeance seemed to him the only thing he had left.
For a time, Clayton said nothing, as if warned from speaking any further word by the look on Danforth’s face.
“You have to go on, Tom,” he said finally. “You have to go back to New York, put Anna’s death behind you.”
Which was the best advice he could have gotten, and which Danforth had briefly hoped to follow, but never could.
~ * ~
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
“Never could,” Danforth said now.
Though he had tried, as he went on to tell me. He returned to New York and resumed his command of Danforth Imports. In that role, he immersed himself, working long hours, then trudging home to his bed. He tried to find pleasure in the old pleasures, in reading and going to plays. He went out with this woman and that one, but with each failed attempt to rekindle that part of his life, he felt himself fall farther and farther from any capacity to do so. In the middle of a luxurious dinner, he would find himself again at the Old Town Bar, fixed upon his ghostly memory of Anna. While Amy or Sandy or Marian prattled on about this or that, he would hear her whispered voice: What is the most beautiful thing you never saw? And with that question, he would think of all the many places he had dreamed of seeing with her and that he now no longer wished to see because he was without her.
“It was like Eve’s love for Adam in Milton’s Paradise Lost,” Danforth said. “That simple, gorgeous line of Eve’s: ‘with him all deaths / I could endure; without him live no life.’”
As the months passed, he worked to ease the ceaseless ache of Anna’s loss. But nothing soothed him or dulled the vividness of his incessant memories of her. At night he would sometimes awaken in the midst of reaching for her, and when he found only emptiness, he would lie on his back and stare at the ceiling and accept the hard fact that nothing could fill this void.
“It was romantic anguish,” Danforth said. He looked as if that very agony had been reignited. “It was passion without an object. I was like a starving man whom no food could satisfy.”
“But you can’t love a dead woman forever, can you?” I asked.
The question appeared to move Danforth, and he immediately turned from it and retreated into his old redoubt of academic discussion.
“The guillotine is an interesting mechanism, Paul,” he said. “It’s supposed to be very fast and entirely painless.” He glanced toward the window, where the snow was still falling steadily, though it had begun to lighten. “But then there’s the problem of Henri Languille.”
This was clearly a signal that I should make further inquiry, and so I did.
“Henri Languille?” I asked.
“A condemned prisoner,” Danforth said. “He was executed by guillotine in 1905. His death was meticulously recorded by a certain Dr. Beaurieux.”
“I see.”
“Dr. Beaurieux’s observations called the guillotine’s efficacy into serious question,” Danforth continued, now completely in that lecturing tone he used to escape, however briefly, from the more emotional parts of his tale. “Of course, there’d been other observers before Beaurieux. For example, when Charlotte Corday was beheaded, someone grabbed her severed head out of the basket and slapped her face. The people who saw this later said that Charlotte had glared at her assailant with what they described as unequivocal indignation.’”
I shivered. “That’s rather ghastly.”
“Indeed, but getting back to Dr. Beaurieux,” Danforth went on. “He said that immediately after the decapitation, Henri Languille’s eyelids and lips continued to move for five or six seconds. When those movements stopped, the doctor called to Languille in a loud, sharp tone, as if he were summoning him. At that summons, Languille’s eyes opened languidly, as if awakened from a light sleep. According to Beaurieux, there was no spasmodic movement in the eyes at all. They stared at him very evenly, then, after a moment, they closed. At that point, the doctor called to Languille again, and once again his eyes opened. He looked like someone torn from his thoughts, Beaurieux said. The eyes were motionless and the pupils were focused. There was nothing dull about their appearance. Nothing vague or faraway in their look. The doctor was convinced that Languille was staring directly at him. After several seconds, the eyes closed again, this time about halfway. Beaurieux called out for a third time, but Languille’s eyes didn’t open, and they began to take on the glazed look of the truly dead.”
All of this struck me as a gruesome excursion, a reaction Danforth recognized and immediately addressed.
“The question is why I would read about such an incident,” Danforth said. “It’s because I could not stop thinking about Anna, and this incessant thinking sent me off in odd, nearly crazed directions. She’d been executed by guillotine, so I read everything I could find about that process. Scores of eyewitness accounts. The history of the thing. It’s called a Fallbeil in German, by the way. ‘Falling ax.’ Between 1933 and 1945 about sixteen thousand people were executed by Fallbeil in Germany and Austria. Hitler liked the method so much he ordered twenty new ones.”
This was all decidedly off the point, I thought, save for the way it exposed the obsessive nature of Danforth’s research, the fact that he’d been driven to do it as a way of. . . what?
“It was a way of not abandoning Anna or allowing her simply to be erased,” Danforth said as if he’d heard the question I’d posed in my mind. “My purpose in doing all this reading was to keep her with me, keep her alive, prevent her from sinking into obscurity, becoming one of history’s nameless victims.” He shrugged. “But of course, reading can only take a man so far, and so, in the end, it was something else that saved me.”
I suddenly feared that Danforth might have fallen to some predictable form of redemption. Religion, perhaps, or another woman.
Hesitantly, I asked, “Which was?”
“War,” Danforth answered. “I was still a young man when it broke out, and so I might have used it to accomplish some noble end or do some great, heroic deed.” His smile was as soft as the white flakes that fell beyond the window. “But for me it only intensified what soon became my single purpose.”