“I think you believe that somehow you’re going to get out of this without any real damage,” Fedora said. “Get out of it and go back to your nice warm little club.”
Danforth felt his muscles moving like tiny insects beneath his skin, a delicate tremble that quickened his flesh with soft, regenerative spasms, and by that movement shook him to a somewhat greater clarity of mind. The haze of pain was lifting, and in its departing mists, the room took on its familiar proportions and no longer seemed skewed and off balance. His mind was returning to him like an old friend.
“But that’s not true,” Fedora said.
The clouds of pain continued to part, and as they did so, Danforth steadily regained his bearings, remembering things he had forgotten, the way at one point Fedora had splashed his body with ice-cold water, the stinging feel of being slapped.
Fedora opened the desk drawer to his right, took out a small spoon, and laid it down on the table. “I’m going to scoop out your eyes, my dear fellow. First one, then the other.” He allowed Danforth to focus his starkly clarifying consciousness upon the spoon, then he picked it up and pointed it directly at Danforth’s eyes.
“Where is Anna Klein?” Fedora asked.
It was at that moment the gorgeous vistas of Danforth’s life turned against him as insidiously as a traitor in the ranks. For he instantly recalled in scores of simultaneous images all the magnificent things his eyes had seen: the snowcapped heights of Fuji, the walls of Avila, Hong Kong from the Peak, Uluru impossibly radiant in a sunset glow.
“Tie his hands,” Fedora said.
Someone stepped behind Danforth’s chair, drew his hands around the back of the chair, and tied them.
“So,” Fedora said when this was done. He lifted the spoon, and it glinted in the light. “So.”
The first wave of panic came in an uncontrollable shaking of his legs, a quaking Danforth experienced as an inward disintegration of his will. It was as if the little island of himself had been struck by a boiling wave that instantly dissolved whatever it touched.
In a suspended instant of intensely clear thought, he saw that he could have faced a pistol without faltering. To die, given the pains that still racked him, would not at that moment have seemed so great a forfeit. Death was only darkness, after all, an oblivion that offered no reminders of what had been lost. But to lose his sight? To see nothing more of this earth forever?
It was a crazed distinction, and he was not unaware of how crazed it was. And yet he felt himself helplessly melting in the curled fist of this one engulfing dread, all that was solid, all that had held up, now evaporating in the impossible heat of a terror he had not expected and against which he could offer no resistance: the love he had for things as yet unseen.
The question returned to him in Anna’s voice, her words so clear that he all but expected Anna suddenly to materialize before him, and the fact that it was this memory of her that most weakened and tormented him seemed the cruelest of ironies.
Fedora was beside him now, his fingers wrapped around the handle of the spoon. His fingers were long and thin; perfect, Danforth thought, for playing the piano.
Fedora drew in a long breath. “So.” He pressed the tip of the spoon beneath Danforth’s left eye. “Where is Anna Klein?”
Danforth thought of the Atlas Mountains, the plains of Kilimanjaro, and last of the Seto Sea from the heights of Miyajima, that storied place his father had said no man should die without seeing.
“Where is Anna Klein?” Fedora repeated.
Danforth felt the answer well up from below, like a swollen gorge rising from his belly, surging up into his throat.
“For the last time,” Fedora said. “Where is Anna Klein?”
Danforth felt the edge of the spoon press down then tilt upward, and with that tiny, otherwise insignificant pinch, Anna’s address exploded toward his mouth so that he could feel his lips forming them, his breath ready to release them, all of them . . . now.
“Well done.”
It was a vaguely familiar voice, and as if at its command, Fedora drew back the spoon and almost immediately untied Danforth’s hands, then gently turned his swivel chair toward the door, where Danforth saw Bannion standing like a guardian of the gate, Clayton beside him, both staring at him with unmistakable admiration.
There were footsteps outside the door, and at the sound, both Clayton and Bannion straightened themselves, as if ordered to attention.
The door opened and she was there, Anna, standing stiffly, like a soldier. She seemed hardly to notice the other men in the room. Her attention was entirely on Danforth, and for a moment her eyes moved over him soothingly, like fingertips.
“We’ll go to France together then,” she said.
As he would remind himself down all the many years to come, he had not been able to determine at that moment whether she was obeying an order or issuing it. He could only see her steeliness, and so he stared at her brokenly, still trembling with fear and rocked by the eddies of his own retreating pain, yet determined to steel himself against whatever might befall him in some future interrogation. Next time, he would keep faith with Anna no matter what, he told himself, even to the point of a spoon.
~ * ~
PART III
