“Yes,” I said firmly.
“Even if you loved this traitor, as I’m sure you’ll agree,” Danforth added. “And even if, perhaps, an innocent person was also put in danger.” He leaned forward slightly. “Because what secures man’s moral life, Paul, is accountability. And accountability is based on punishment, the more sure and certain, the better.” Now he sat back. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
He was silent for a moment, his gaze very steadily upon me, then he said, “Later, I came to wonder just how many parts Anna had acted. She once told me that she’d worked for a few weeks at a French construction firm on Vandam Street, translating correspondence. It turns out that this was true. I know because I checked the records.”
Checked the records? So Danforth had carried out some sort of investigation of Anna, I thought, one he’d conducted after the war. Why, I wondered, had he done that?
But before I could ask him directly, Danforth posed a question of his own.
“Tell me, Paul, have you seen much of the world?”
“Some,” I answered.
“Asia? Africa?”
“No.”
“The Middle East?”
I shook my head. “I’m not a world traveler, if that’s your point,” I said a little sharply.
A vague dreaminess came over him. “The Seto Sea,” he said. “I went there three years ago. They have a rope way, a cable car that takes you up Mount Misen.” Briefly, he seemed captured by that moment in his past. Then quite abruptly, he returned to the present, though not directly to his tale.
“Did you know that Kyoto was at the top of the list of cities marked for the first atomic bomb?” he asked.
“No,” I confessed.
“General Groves wanted Kyoto bombed first,” Danforth told me. “It was the ancient Japanese capital, so its destruction would devastate Japanese morale, he said. It was also surrounded by mountains that would concentrate the blast.” He drained the last of the port. “But Secretary of War Stimson scratched Kyoto off the list. He’d been there, you see. Twice, actually. Once on his honeymoon.” He looked at me significantly. “It’s hard to destroy something you have reason to love.” His smile struck me as a direct warning. “Travel removes places from the target list, Paul. In a way, it removed Paris. A German general refused to destroy it and lied to Hitler when he was asked if Paris was burning.”
“Yes,” I said, somewhat relieved that I was familiar with this story “I read about that.”
“That general made a wise choice,” Danforth said. “Paris is a beautiful city. Anna and I arrived there the third week in May.”
“I’d rented two apartments on the Left Bank, just off Saint-Germain-des-Pres,” Danforth said.
“Two apartments?” I asked.
“You mean, did we sleep together?” Danforth asked. “Is that what you want to know, Paul? Did Anna and I have fantastic sex then enjoy a
I had to admit that his earlier mention of the “erotics of intrigue” had rather surreptitiously asserted itself.
“Something like that,” I said, a little embarrassed that I had given this away so blatantly.
Danforth straightened one sleeve of his jacket. “No, we were not lovers.”
What they were, or later became, sparkled briefly in his eyes, then vanished like a candle tossed down a well.
“But Paris was beautiful, a city of lights,” Danforth added. “And there was the touch of intrigue I felt every time Anna presented her passport, the very American name she’d chosen: she was now Anna Collier. Everything gave off a certain dramatic charge and made my little world a tad brighter.” He drew in a breath that was quick and light, yet with something heavy at its center. “Even in those dark days.”
~ * ~
Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, France, 1939
They sat down a little distance from the L’Orangerie, both tired from the day’s long walk. During the last few hours, they’d reconnoitered the city, an expedition that had taken them from Passy, where Balzac had lived his extravagant life, to the groves of Pere-Lachaise, where that life had come to rest. They’d wandered the streets of Pigalle and mounted the stairs to Sacre Coeur. In that way, street by street, Paris had revealed itself as all great cities do, like an exotic dancer shedding one veil at a time.
Anna looked out over the park, gazing first at a group of children in their school uniforms, then at an old man in a black beret, and finally at a young couple strolling arm in arm down one of the neatly manicured paths.
“Our city of intrigue,” Danforth said lightly.
In later years, he would consider how odd it was that he was there, how little he’d known, and he’d see this as emblematic of the decision to break free from the moorings of his former life. Despite the peril that followed, when he recalled sitting with Anna in the Jardin des Tuileries that evening, he regretted nothing about his decision to accompany her, not the complex business matters he’d abruptly left in the care of others, or even the
