of spies. She had none of the studied exoticism of Mata Hari, nothing flamboyant or bejeweled. She looked like someone’s daughter or someone’s sister or someone’s wife. The trappings of the courtesan would have embarrassed her, and Danforth could not imagine her the mistress of some powerful military or government official, gathering secrets revealed during boudoir encounters, passing them on in packets sealed with red wax.
And yet, at that galvanizing moment, Danforth found himself drawn to her as he had never been drawn to any woman before or would be after; through all the passing years, he would hear the click of her heels upon the cobblestones of Orleans and see her eyes searching for him among the assembling throng; he’d remember her sudden, sweet look of recognition when she saw him, followed by her pulling back from whatever regard for him, romantic or otherwise, she’d so briefly revealed.
“Is he still planning to be here?” she asked in French.
She meant Deloncle, who was scheduled to appear at a rally in this, his hometown.
“Yes,” Danforth told her. “At Place du Martroi.”
Place du Martroi was a large square, the town’s central meeting place. The Hotel de Ville rested at its far end, with the rest of the square bordered by the stately, powder-white facades common to government buildings. Ninety years before, an equestrian statue of Joan of Arc had been commissioned by the town. It showed the Maid of Orleans in full military garb. Anna paused to look at it. She did not appear to identify with Joan or think herself a force in history, and yet something in the way she stopped and gazed on the statue would return to Danforth many times, Anna not as a vision of the female warrior on the march but as a woman contemplating with a certain sympathy the visionary madness of a deluded girl.
The assembly was large but by no means filled the square. Deloncle was a fierce extremist, after all, not a figure of widespread adoration, as de Gaulle would later become. And as Danforth noted a few minutes later, even Prime Minister Daladier, for all his barrel-chested squatness, gave off a considerably more commanding physical presence than the man who now mounted a small platform to address the crowd.
Eugene Deloncle, dressed in a dark suit and wearing a bowler hat, looked more like a bank clerk than the founding member of a violent terrorist organization pledged to bring down the Third Republic. He demonstrated none of the Fascist posturing so much a part of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s public displays, and far from Leon Gambetta’s storied vocal range, his voice would have died a few yards from the platform had amplifiers not been set up to broadcast to the far reaches of the crowd. To offset the general ordinariness of his dress and bearing, he had added only a red rosebud that winked from his lapel and that seemed as out of place as a jewel in a mound of earth.
It was a day for flags, all of them French and all of them waving as Deloncle addressed the crowd. He began with a recitation of the many failures of the present government. Danforth had read excerpts of Deloncle’s speeches, and this one was no different from those, save that the speaker seemed more certain that his dire predictions would come to pass, the inevitable war doubtless the harbinger of a great struggle through which the many enemies of France would get what had long been coming to them. First among the villains he named were Communists and Jews, whom he seemed to think one and the same.
The speech went on for half an hour, the crowd cheering repeatedly as Deloncle continued his attack, his rhetoric growing more vehement with each burst of applause until finally he seemed to drown in his own vitriol and, in a kind of emotional exhaustion, turned the microphone over to another speaker.
The entire rally lasted only a few minutes longer, and once it was done, the crowd dispersed more quickly than Danforth had expected, most of them strolling to the many cafes along the square.
Anna watched them go for a time, then said something Danforth had never expected and found extraordinary.
“It’s too late for the Project,” she said. “And it was never enough anyway.”
“Never enough to what?” Danforth asked.
“To matter,” Anna said.
She looked at him in a way that made him suddenly recall a night in Paris, how he’d left her apartment and walked across the square at Saint-Germain-des-Pres, and then stopped, glanced up, and noticed her silhouette in the window. He’d thought then, and it returned to him now, that she had all her life been intent upon some purpose, that her current situation was merely the implementation of that long-imagined act.
“Then what do you propose?” Danforth asked.
“I don’t know,” Anna admitted.
For the first time, she seemed at sea, as if some earlier certainty had been taken from her. She was silent for a time, then, as they slowly walked the square, she began to question not only the Project but any other scheme that would reduce her to a “little spy.” If war broke out, what good would it do to send reports of this troop movement or that when the point was to stop those movements? In the same vein, what would be the point of blowing up a bridge or mangling railway tracks? Another bridge would soon replace it, and mangled tracks could be taken up and replaced within hours. And finally, what was the point of waiting for the war to begin at all?
Her expression changed then in a way that Danforth would often think of in the coming years. He would remember how she’d drawn in a long breath, as if undecided about how to voice the idea that had come to her; apparently anticipating that it would be thought absurd, she’d broached the topic at a slant.
“When I was a little girl, we had a nice garden,” she said. “I often played in it. One day, a snake came into the garden. My father killed it with a hoe. He showed me the remains of the snake, picking up the head in one hand and the body in the other. ‘To kill a snake,’ he told me, ‘you must chop off the head.”‘
She paused, as if the conclusion she’d just come to had stopped her cold. “Do you understand what I mean, Tom?”
He did not understand, and so he simply looked at her, quite baffled.
Very deliberately she added, “I saw a picture of him in Prague. He rides in an open touring car.”
Suddenly, Danforth saw the unreality, the sheer absurdity, of what she was getting at.
“Hitler?” he asked in an astonished whisper.
She nodded but added nothing else. Danforth saw immediately that he was trapped: either doomed to be a
