“Time for a chat,” Fedora said. He had taken off his suit jacket and now wore dark blue flannel trousers and a light blue open-collared shirt.
Danforth rose and followed the man down a short corridor, at the end of which he opened the door, stepped away, and motioned Danforth inside.
The look of this room was unmistakable. It had a small, rectangular wooden desk with chairs that faced each other. A narrow table rested behind the desk, bare save for a pitcher and a few white towels.
“Sit down,” Fedora told him, and on those words, closed the door, walked to the desk, and sat down behind it.
“Where is Anna Klein?” he asked casually and with an almost bored air, as he might have asked after the whereabouts of a lost cat.
Danforth sat down but said nothing, and years later, first in the interrogation rooms of Plotzensee in Berlin, and later in Lubyanka, he would marvel that all such places gave off the same sweaty dread, fear like an odor coming from the walls.
Fedora peered at him grimly. “I’m not going to ask you this question over and over again. I won’t have to, believe me. But before I ask it again, take some time and think things through.”
Danforth glanced toward the door. One of the other men opened it, came in, and stood in place in front of it, arms folded over his chest and wearing a strange expression, like a dog eager to be fed. They must seek out and find such men as this, Danforth thought, perfect for their purposes, the sort able to relish what others abhor.
Danforth remained unaware of time, and he wondered if this too was part of the game, to remove a man completely from the ordinary signals of life, his inner bearings weakened by the loss of all outer ones.
To resist that far-from-subtle ploy, Danforth focused on his cufflinks. They were gold with small sapphires, and he’d bought them in Paris, at a little shop near the Luxembourg Gardens. Now he recalled the great expanse of that garden, how it had been so very French in that the children had not been permitted to play on the grass but instead had dashed and fallen and briefly wallowed in the dust of its wide, pebbled walkways. Paris in the morning, he thought, and saw the gardens in bright sunlight. Paris in the afternoon. Paris at night. So that is what it is, he thought, time.
“Where is Anna Klein?” Fedora asked.
This was the second time the question had been asked, and Danforth knew that whatever came next would be either the making or the undoing of him, that at the end of it, he would have either the highest regard for himself or the lowest, and that either way, in all likelihood he would never be so tested again.
He felt a kind of stiffness overtake him, a leathery thickening of his skin, a hardening of his bones, as if his body were preparing for the ordeal to come. But it was the innermost part of him he sensed most physically at that moment, something solidifying at the center of himself, so that he realized that although he’d many times felt the beat of his heart, the expansion of his lungs, the banal shift and quiver of all his other organs, he had not until that moment of inward reckoning felt the palpable workings of his soul.
“Put your hands behind your back,” Fedora commanded.
Danforth hesitated, less out of any genuine will to resist than as a child would hesitate before taking his place in a dentist’s chair.
“Put your hands behind your back,” Fedora repeated.
Danforth knew that he was being asked to be complicit in his own torture, but he could find no way to resist doing as he was told that didn’t seem both futile and foolish. Perhaps this was part of the torturer’s strategy, he thought, to break your spirit a little before he begins to break your body. Had all the great legions of victims cooperated with their torturers, he wondered, and instantly imagined them in the dungeons of the Inquisition, all meekly placing themselves onto the rack, lying back, positioning their feet and hands.
Even thinking this, Danforth found himself unable to refuse, though he stood, lifted his head, and manfully straightened his shoulders as he brought his hands behind his back.
The other man stepped forward and tied them, then grabbed Danforth by his shirt collar and hauled him out if the room, Fedora following behind.
Seconds later, they entered a different room off the corridor. It was completely bare save for a rope whose two loose ends dangled from a pulley.
Another push and Danforth stood with his back to the dangling ropes, waiting silently as Fedora attached the pulley’s ropes to the one that bound his hands together.
When it was done, the other man stepped back and gave a hard yank on the rope.
Danforth cried out as his body bent forward and a terrible pain streaked down his arms.
“Remember the question,” the man said as he yanked the rope a second time, more violently, so that the pain became a flame that shot up and down Danforth’s arms, circled his neck, then hurtled like a bolt of fire along his spine, legs, all the way down to the feet.
“Remember the question as we go along,” the man said.
He did not speak again for half an hour.
~ * ~
Century Club, New York City, 2001
“Father Grandier,” Danforth said in a sudden, typically disorienting aside. “Now that was an interrogation.”
I saw a memory of pain flicker in Danforth’s eyes and felt the discomfort one always feels in the presence of someone whose experience of suffering is vastly deeper than one’s own.
“I’m afraid I’ve never heard of him,” I said.
Even so, I thought that Father Grandier must be some heroic priest who had resisted the Nazis during the
