Quest for Anna Klein, The (19 page)

“We'll need to work out supply routes that are off the beaten track,” he said.

And so for the next few minutes, they spoke of the original plan, a conversation during which Danforth realized that Anna had practically memorized the entire map of France: where each road led and through which villages, along with the routes of all the rivers, particularly the ones that emptied into the sea. It was as if she were plotting some enormous evacuation.

After that, she seemed reluctant to speak at all, her silences so long and grave Danforth later wondered if she had already embarked on a far different project, one whose dark route and fatal end she had decided long ago.

“So,” Danforth said jokingly, by way of testing those waters, “maybe we will change the world.”

Anna shook her head. “No,” she said. “We are just little spies.”

Little spies.

There would be times in the future, Danforth said, when he would ask himself if this remark had moved Anna deeper into a plot she'd already begun to contemplate, or if it was from that grim conclusion that the plot had taken wing. Or perhaps the grave conspiracy that had sealed his fate had never been anything but a shadow plot whose goal had been to keep him utterly in the dark.

“Little spies,” Danforth repeated now, in a way that suggested he had many times turned this same sentence over in his mind. “We're guided through life by a mirror ball,” he said. “With only little flashes to light our way.” He suddenly appeared captured by a distant terror, and he said, “The world was on fire, Paul. And Anna seemed to feel that we were doing nothing to put it out. She didn't say it outright, but I could see it building in her mind.” He was silent for a time, then he said, “Bannion believed that her mind worked like a mosaic: shards of this or that, illuminated here or there, but at last forming a brilliant pattern. He believed that to the very end.”

“The end of what?”

“His life,” Danforth answered casually. “By then he had nothing but contempt for me.”

“Contempt? Why?”

Danforth smiled softly. “Because he thought I was a lovesick fool.” He drew in a long, troubled breath. “And it was true, Paul,” he said. “I had quite proven that by then.” He laughed gently at what he now seemed to regard as a sad fantasy. “I remember how Bannion once shook his head and looked at me as if I'd never be able to understand real commitment. ‘With you,' he said, ‘it was always her.' Which was true, and which I became aware of after Christophe.”

“After Christophe?” I asked.

“Yes,” Danforth said. “Because quite by accident he came back into the story. Not with any fanfare, but like fifth business in an opera. The little thing that moves a big thing, and sets even bigger things into motion. With Christophe, it was just a chance meeting in Paris, but it changed everything.”

“
Bonjour,
Thomas.”

Danforth turned and saw Christophe, typically bedraggled, moving toward him holding a package covered in brown paper and tied with string.

“I spend a lot of time in the park now,” he said. “It's big enough to hide in.”

“Why are you hiding?” Danforth asked.

“I am the new Marat,” Christophe said with a self-deprecating laugh.

For a moment his eyes softened, and something in them revealed the little boy he had once been, no doubt the most restless and idiosyncratic in his class, doomed by his own nervous energy and incapacity to conform, so that he now seemed as pitiable as Marat must have, a denizen of the city's sewers.

He indicated the ragged package beneath his arm. “It's my book,” he said. “It's about my time in Spain.”

He suddenly became surprisingly talkative, relating tales of combat (a bullet in the thigh in Madrid, shattered ribs when a caisson had rolled over him during the retreat toward the Pyrenees). As he continued, Danforth found himself liking the man more and more, for he was one of those people who could narrate stories of his own self-sacrifice and personal courage in a manner that was comically self-mocking. The bullet in the leg had been his own fault for trying to piss out of view of a young nun. The caisson had rolled over him because he'd dropped his ration of bread, bent down to retrieve it, been butted in the ass by an irritated burro, and from there had slid down a pebbly slope and into the path (talk about bad timing!) of the rolling caisson. He was essentially destitute, and his faith in Communism was all but childlike, but he was also generous and funny, and to these qualities he had added courage and commitment and a willingness to sacrifice his life for the great ideal of unifying mankind beneath the fluttering banner of the International Brigades.

“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.

“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.”

She crossed the street that day at the height of noon, and Dan-forth would forever after recall that in that bright summer sun, with the grand façade 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 offi cial, gathering se
crets 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 Hôtel de Ville rested at its far end, with the rest of the square bordered by the stately, powder-white façades 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.

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 cafés along the square.