learned at Winterset. We would teach these same skills to various contacts. We would be secret agents. We would live lives of intrigue in service to our shared cause.” He smiled. “Youth is life’s chief deceiver, Paul, and its chief deception is that you will somehow escape the common fate.” The smile withered. “At that moment, with this vision circling in my head, I should have heard that little hammer. Because these would be the last days I would be without suspicion or look forward without fear.”
He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and produced a cable encased in plastic, preserved as if it were a rare document. He handed it to me.
It was dated May 21,1939, and it was from Clayton. He was in London, where he’d encountered “some urgent business problems.” Danforth and Anna were to meet him there as quickly as they could book passage. He was staying at the Savoy. In the meantime, they were to “take care.”
“Well, what do you make of that, Paul?” Danforth asked.
“Nothing,” I said. I handed it back to him.
“It wouldn’t cause you any alarm?”
“About what?”
“Clayton? That he might be a traitor.”
“No,” I said, quite confidently. “Why would it cause me to doubt Clayton?”
“You’re right; it wouldn’t, of course,” Danforth said. “It wouldn’t cause any alarm having to do with a specific person. But in a vague way, it might make you begin to doubt everything. It might produce a sense of things perhaps being not quite right. I mean, just what are these ‘urgent business problems’ about which Anna and I should ‘take care’? You would not doubt Clayton or anyone else. But you would suddenly feel . . . on trembling ground.” He smiled.
“That is the sinister art of deceit, Paul,” he said. “To make things unclear, to allow for multiple interpretations. It’s very effective at disorienting even the most experienced of conspirators, because more than anything, the conspirator seeks certainty. If he is certain he is discovered, he will act accordingly, probably by getting the hell out of town. If he is certain that he is not discovered, he will act accordingly, stay put and carry on with his plot. But when he is truly unsure if he is or is not discovered, he will be in a constant state of fearful disequilibrium. He will sleep, this uncertain conspirator, but he will do it fitfully, and his judgment will be clouded by this lack of rest. He will sleep but this sleep will exhaust and debilitate him and fill his mind with unsettled thoughts and unfounded fears. He will sleep, but only as we wish him to sleep, warily.” His smile was as lupine as the thing he said: “It is called the sleep of wolves.” He returned the cable to his jacket pocket. “We left for London the next day.”
~ * ~
Paris, France, 1939
But they had dinner on the boulevard Raspail the night before they left for London, and while they ate, Danforth told Anna how his father had taught him to be wily and observant. Watch for the unseen, he had told him, and listen for the unsaid.
He hoped, he said, that he had learned those lessons well.
“They are useful lessons,” Anna said, and added nothing else.
After dinner, he walked her to her door, where they parted with a long, close embrace that Danforth found curiously exciting, as if he’d received a jolt of energy, one that lingered long after and finally kept him from sleep. Eventually he rose and headed out into the street.
It had rained earlier in the evening, and now a few soggy papier-mache remnants of some sort of patriotic celebration hung heavily from balconies and trees. Posters memorializing a glorious past bowed from dripping kiosks, and it seemed to Danforth that all around the city, there was a sense that only the past could be celebrated, because what lay ahead for France, and perhaps for the world, was utterly uncertain.
The windows of the shops were dark, but even in the shadows Danforth could see how much style still mattered to the French. In a bakery, it was in the blush on little marzipan peaches. In a boutique, it was a dress with an impudent ruffle. In a gift shop, a decorative box tied with lace. These small gestures stood against the encroaching doom, Danforth thought, but at the same time he wondered if this was all that stood against it.
Surely not, he decided, and in a kind of reverie he imagined a vastly extended web of heroic conspirators, an army of courageous men and women who passed notes in Viennese cafes and exchanged signals on the Ponte Vecchio. In Budapest they hid crates of arms and loaded them into little boats and sailed them to cadres waiting along the Danube. Other arms came ashore at Marseille or Dubrovnik and were taken far inland by railway car or covered with hay and borne by horse-drawn wagons into the heart of Prague. Surely in Copenhagen and Oslo, and from Calais to Trieste, there were brave men and women who thought of nothing but how this dark tide must be stopped. Surely, Danforth declared to himself, surely at some illuminating moment not far in the future, the blustering Prince of Darkness would confront a rifle behind every blade of grass.
This was not an illusion he could long sustain, however, and by the time he returned to his apartment, his fantasy of a sweeping pan-European resistance had died a dog’s death, and dawn found him by the window, peering out over the boulevard, wondering if he and Anna could still carry out their mission if Clayton’s “urgent business matters” proved more perilous than he’d supposed, or if Clayton himself—the unsettling possibility suddenly struck him — was something other than he seemed.
~ * ~
Century Club, New York City, 2001
“Other than he seemed?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Clayton other than he seemed,” I repeated, now no less unsettled than Danforth had been so many years before. “So that cable
“That night, as I was standing at the window, yes, that thought did occur to me,” Danforth answered. “But not because of anything I actually knew about Clayton. It was more general than that, and it was very vague. Later, I would come to believe that life itself—when you look it in the eye —is a treacherous thing. It isn’t out to break our hearts, as the Irish say. It’s out to leave us baffled and confused, to strip us of any faith we might have in anyone, even ourselves. That’s what life really is, Paul, a wearing down of trust.”
