“You don’t even know what the Project is,” Clayton said.
“I don’t care what it is.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Tom,” Clayton said. “Hard slogging’s not for you.”
Later, Danforth would recall Clayton’s remark often. He would recall it as he tramped through the mud and snow of blasted villages, and as he sat, waylaid for hours, in storm-beleaguered airports and railway stations, although those difficulties hardly compared to those that still awaited him then.
“I also feel that Anna shouldn’t go alone,” Danforth added urgently.
“But that was always the plan,” Clayton said. “She expects to go alone.”
“But there’s no reason why she should,” Danforth said. “I’d be the perfect cover, wouldn’t I? An importer with plenty of business reasons to be in Europe. And I have contacts. If things got really hot, I’d have the best chance of getting both of us out.”
“This is not a game, Tom,” Clayton reminded him. “The next step is a big one. We’re talking about an indefinite period in Europe, not a weekend lark.”
“I know,” Danforth answered. “I have people who can take over the business. I’ll tell my father that Danforth Imports is getting long in the tooth, that it needs new contacts, new sources. That maybe I need rejuvenation too.”
In later years, Danforth would hear his argument with the sad amusement of an old man confronting the young one he’d once been, and each time he did so, he would remember that Clayton had not once betrayed any feeling for Anna or given the slightest indication that he expected her to survive her mission, whatever it was. Because of that, as his mind careened from villain to villain, Danforth would forever wonder if Clayton had always known that, whether on this mission or the next, Anna would find a way to die.
“What about Cecilia?” Clayton asked.
“That’s already settled.”
This seemed genuinely to surprise Clayton but also to move him one step farther toward considering Danforth’s proposition.
“Anna is not some little spy,” Clayton said. “What we have in mind is a large effort. We’re not talking about her sitting around with a wireless, tapping out messages. There will be a lot of movement. Difficult logistics, once the operation is afoot.” He looked at Danforth very seriously. “You could be killed.”
Danforth realized that only a few weeks before, he would not have been able to tell if this was a genuine warning or just one of Clayton’s inflations.
“I know,” Danforth said.
Clayton studied him a moment. “I’ll talk to Bannion,” he said. “He was the one who actually thought of the Project. He has a right to have some say in what I decide.”
“I understand,” Danforth told him.
With that, they walked back to Clayton’s car and said goodbye to each other. Danforth returned to the house, took a seat at the small table where he and LaRoche and Anna had shared their first meal. Then in his mind he journeyed farther back, to the tavern where he’d first seen Anna, frantic and befuddled, a street grotesque in the making, and finally back to that first bit of conversation with Clayton, the small fuse he’d lit, which was now burning more brightly than he’d ever expected. How odd that his own good fortune could prove so hollow, he thought, that the life of a secret agent could attract him so, that for him the pursuit of happiness would seek its measure in the pursuit of peril, and that in this pursuit he would feel for this new life — as he suddenly realized he did —a surprisingly charged tingle of desire.
~ * ~
Century Club, New York City, 2001
The curious emergence of this word in the context of his story must have been visible in my face, because Danforth suddenly grew very still, then said, “They are strange, the erotics of intrigue.”
“I would sometimes imagine myself endlessly strolling the old streets of Gion at dusk,” Danforth continued, “forever strolling among the geisha and the
“When would you feel this?” I asked.
“In the prisons and on the trains,” Danforth said. “When I thought of her.”
“Of Anna?”
He was clearly reaching for something whose touch still pained him.
For a moment he seemed to dissolve into his own memory. “Love as performance, as something . . . acted.”
It was obvious to me that this was too sensitive a subject for anyone but Danforth alone to pursue, and so I said nothing.
“The ‘smile of smiles,’ Blake called it,” Danforth added. “It’s where love and deception meet.”
After this, he fell silent for a time. Then, quite surprisingly, he smiled. “Tell me, Paul, have you ever seen
This question, along with his abrupt change in mood, sent my mind spinning. “The old Hitchcock movie?” I
