He hadn’t, and so she told him that an earlier armada, this one launched by Kublai Khan, had attempted the conquest of Japan. A storm, not unlike the one that had sunk the ships of King Philip, had spelled doom for this armada too, a divine intervention the Japanese had immortalized and yearly celebrated as a Divine Wind.
“My mother told me that story,” Anna said when she finished it.
This mention clearly summoned emotions she did not want, so she looked away, out toward the far shores of France, a retreat he had seen before and that, rather than putting him off, inexplicably drew him to her.
“After dinner, I had drinks with Clayton,” he told her at one point. “I didn’t see anything that told me if Clayton was playing some game. I wish I’d found some sign to read. But if one was there, I couldn’t read it.”
Neither spoke for a time, and during that interval Danforth worked to reassess the situation in which he found himself: heading back to France with Anna, but with no clear activity in mind save at some point secreting supplies for an army of interned Spaniards. Anna now seemed to have waning interest in the mission, so he felt compelled to reawaken it.
“We’ll need to work out supply routes that are off the beaten track,” he said.
And so for the next few minutes, they spoke of the original plan, a conversation during which Danforth realized that Anna had practically memorized the entire map of France: where each road led and through which villages, along with the routes of all the rivers, particularly the ones that emptied into the sea. It was as if she were plotting some enormous evacuation.
After that, she seemed reluctant to speak at all, her silences so long and grave Danforth later wondered if she had already embarked on a far different project, one whose dark route and fatal end she had decided long ago.
“So,” Danforth said jokingly, by way of testing those waters, “maybe we will change the world.”
Anna shook her head. “No,” she said. “We are just little spies.”
~ * ~
Century Club, New York City, 2001
There would be times in the future, Danforth said, when he would ask himself if this remark had moved Anna deeper into a plot she’d already begun to contemplate, or if it was from that grim conclusion that the plot had taken wing. Or perhaps the grave conspiracy that had sealed his fate had never been anything but a shadow plot whose goal had been to keep him utterly in the dark.
“Little spies,” Danforth repeated now, in a way that suggested he had many times turned this same sentence over in his mind. “We’re guided through life by a mirror ball,” he said. “With only little flashes to light our way.” He suddenly appeared captured by a distant terror, and he said, “The world was on fire, Paul. And Anna seemed to feel that we were doing nothing to put it out. She didn’t say it outright, but I could see it building in her mind.” He was silent for a time, then he said, “Bannion believed that her mind worked like a mosaic: shards of this or that, illuminated here or there, but at last forming a brilliant pattern. He believed that to the very end.”
“The end of what?”
“His life,” Danforth answered casually. “By then he had nothing but contempt for me.”
“Contempt? Why?”
Danforth smiled softly. “Because he thought I was a lovesick fool.” He drew in a long, troubled breath. “And it was true, Paul,” he said. “I had quite proven that by then.” He laughed gently at what he now seemed to regard as a sad fantasy. “I remember how Bannion once shook his head and looked at me as if I’d never be able to understand real commitment. ‘With you,’ he said, ‘it was always her.’ Which was true, and which I became aware of after Christophe.”
“After Christophe?” I asked.
“Yes,” Danforth said. “Because quite by accident he came back into the story. Not with any fanfare, but like fifth business in an opera. The little thing that moves a big thing, and sets even bigger things into motion. With Christophe, it was just a chance meeting in Paris, but it changed everything.”
~ * ~
Paris, France, 1939
Danforth turned and saw Christophe, typically bedraggled, moving toward him holding a package covered in brown paper and tied with string.
“I spend a lot of time in the park now,” he said. “It’s big enough to hide in.”
“Why are you hiding?” Danforth asked.
“I am the new Marat,” Christophe said with a self-deprecating laugh.
For a moment his eyes softened, and something in them revealed the little boy he had once been, no doubt the most restless and idiosyncratic in his class, doomed by his own nervous energy and incapacity to conform, so that he now seemed as pitiable as Marat must have, a denizen of the city’s sewers.
He indicated the ragged package beneath his arm. “It’s my book,” he said. “It’s about my time in Spain.”
He suddenly became surprisingly talkative, relating tales of combat (a bullet in the thigh in Madrid, shattered ribs when a caisson had rolled over him during the retreat toward the Pyrenees). As he continued, Danforth found himself liking the man more and more, for he was one of those people who could narrate stories of his own self- sacrifice and personal courage in a manner that was comically self-mocking. The bullet in the leg had been his own fault for trying to piss out of view of a young nun. The caisson had rolled over him because he’d dropped his ration of bread, bent down to retrieve it, been butted in the ass by an irritated burro, and from there had slid down a pebbly slope and into the path (talk about bad timing!) of the rolling caisson. He was essentially destitute, and his faith in Communism was all but childlike, but he was also generous and funny, and to these qualities he had added
