“To love a woman and not know who she is,” Danforth went on. “Or a man and not know what he did.” His gaze briefly intensified. “To love a cause but not know where it leads. They are different in many ways, but in one way they are the same.”
“In what way the same?” I asked indulgently.
“In that one simple parable can contain them all,” Danforth said.
This was the second time Danforth had referred to his story as a parable, though now his reference seemed more complicated, as if he were trying to convince me that this would be a multilayered tale, at once sweeping and intimate, by turns adventure story, morality play, and God knows what else, but at its end a narrative worth my time. His need to make his case seemed rather sad to me, making me feel that, rather than being an intelligence analyst on assignment, I was a volunteer at an old-age home, sent to sit by the bed and feign rapt attention to some old duffer as he recalled the many Chevrolets he’d owned.
Danforth appeared to see all this and so returned to the concrete aspects of his story.
“After the war began, we could do it differently,” he said. “There was no need for secret training. We simply dropped people out of the sky.”
He seemed still in awe and admiration of these night-bound, behind-the-lines jumpers, the courage their actions had required, and his voice began to show the old grief he felt, that so many had been lost.
“It was amazing how little they carried, the ones who were dropped behind the lines once the war began,” he said. “An entrenching tool for burying the chute, a compass for finding your way. A pair of glasses for disguise. It’s quite surprising how well they work, Paul. Just a pair of spectacles with clear glass lenses. It gives you a totally different appearance.” He rolled his eyes upward slightly. “False identification, of course. One needed that. A map. Matches for secret writing. A little chocolate for energy. A razor. A dozen or so detonators if you were going to blow something up. A wireless to make reports.” He thought a moment, then added, “Oh, and a revolver . . . for that tight spot you dread.”
I found this a rather impressive display of insider knowledge, but more important, it raised the question of Danforth’s own wartime activities.
“Were you dropped?” I asked.
“Yes, but that was several years after my work with the Project had been completed,” Danforth answered. “My target was Sete, a little fishing village between Marseille and Barcelona, on the Mediterranean. The poet Paul Valery was born there. He said something I’ve often recalled over the years, that a poem is never finished, only abandoned. It’s the same with an ideal, I think, or a quest.” He shrugged. “Anyway, Sete was quite lovely, with its canals.”
“Why were you sent there?” I asked.
“To find out if Spain was truly neutral,” Danforth answered. “Which it was. Spain had already been bled white by its civil war. Besides, the Germans had nothing but contempt for the Spanish, and the Spanish knew it. ‘For the Germans, Africa begins at the Pyrenees,’ my Spanish contacts used to say. Meaning that Spain was Africa to them, impoverished and inept, unworthy of consideration.”
“Spanish contacts. You crossed into Spain?”
“Yes,” Danforth said. “I pretty much kept in the vicinity of Saragossa. My mission was to watch for any sign that arms were moving out of Spain and toward Vichy France.”
“Were you still with Anna at that time?” I asked.
And suddenly it was there, that little light going off, then on, then off again, and that seemed to flash distantly but insistently, like a warning signal at the entrance to a place Danforth both did and did not wish to go.
He lifted his glass, but rather than drink, he swirled the wine softly, gazing at its ruby glow. “No, I was not with Anna,” he said. His hand stopped and the wine’s surface calmed again. “Blood red,” he said, and appeared lost in that thought.
“The training,” I said in order to bring him back. “We were last at Winterset during Anna’s training.”
“Oh, yes,” Danforth said. “There was a good deal more training, of course. LaRoche was a genius at destruction.”
“Destruction?” I asked. “But he was only teaching her to use a pistol for self-defense, wasn’t he?”
“At first,” Danforth said. “But there were other skills to be learned.”
“What skills?”
“Those of a saboteur,” Danforth said. “The word comes from the Dutch, you know, from when Dutch workers threw their wooden shoes, their sabots, into the cogs of the textile machines that threatened their jobs.”
“So you never lost your interest in languages,” I said.
“No,” Danforth said. “Because words are important, Paul. Do you know how Sartre defined a Jew?”
I shook my head.
“As someone whom someone else calls a Jew,” Danforth answered. He looked at me sharply. “It was all in the word, never in the person.” He let this sink in, then added, “A word like that,
The way Danforth pointedly made this remark gave me the impression that he had long been planning it and that other such remarks lay like mines in the road ahead.
“A word is an explosive,” I repeated, with no hint that I found the comment a trifle overdramatic, as well as trite.
“Yes,” Danforth said. “Which brings me back to Anna.”
~ * ~
