Morning did not become him; in the mirror he saw the deep lines, the heavy bags, the snow-white hair comic in its disarray. Time, in the end, is a drowning pool, and as he peered at his withered face, Danforth felt himself suffocating beneath the many regrets that pressed in on him. Shouldn’t he have known from the beginning that it was all a foolish enterprise and that like all such exploits it would end in disaster? At the first firings of his love for Anna, shouldn’t he have done everything he could to rescue her from this tomfoolery, thus saving both their lives? Had he missed some subtle sign of treachery that, had he seen it, might have saved her? Had Rache ever walked past him or sat, a silent figure behind a potted plant, peering at Bannion or Anna, or even Danforth himself, knowing full well that they were only little spies, silly in their hope and expendable for its dashing?
After Clayton’s funeral, his wife had given Danforth her husband’s old service revolver, a gesture his old friend had requested only hours before his death. It would be fitting, Danforth thought now, for Clayton’s gun to bring down the curtain on a drama he had begun so many years before.
He had visited Buenos Aires only once, in company with his father, but he faintly recalled the old neighborhood of La Locanda, with its small, colorfully painted buildings. He had read that here, in these quaint and quite lovely streets, there were houses where the victims of the ongoing repression were kept and tormented before they disappeared, and he wondered if Rache had found a place for himself in this world of pain. He knew that certain men were drawn to life’s dungeons and death chambers. He had met them during his own interrogations, and he had met them as he himself was interrogated. They were the sewer’s most pernicious flotsam, and he had learned enough of the world to understand that they were as numerous as grains of sand. But he was no longer a man of the world, he thought, no longer one inclined to inject himself into its great affairs. He had given himself over to this only once, and disastrously, and now he felt at home in the concentrated measure of his need for reprisal. He had not saved the world, but he was unquestionably prepared to remove one villain from it.
And this he would do for Anna.
The house he located a few minutes later struck him as extraordinarily modest. If life followed art, an epic tale spanning decades and continents would have an epic setting for its final scene. But the house was small and in bad repair, with a cramped, weedy yard and a roof saddened by broken tiles.
Suddenly, Danforth recalled the times he’d killed, and it seemed to him that it was his memory acting as a buttress to his courage, reminding him that he had taken life at close quarters. He was not new to murder, he told himself, and despite his years, his trigger finger remained strong. When the moment came, he would make his will match his muscles. That had always been the key to action, and as he stepped forward and drew open the rusty iron gate that opened onto the narrow pathway that led to the cottage’s door, he told himself that he must be the man he’d been all those many years ago:
The walkway was of uneven brick, treacherous for a man his age, but Danforth maneuvered along it slowly and carefully, his gaze on the path until he reached the door. Once there, he drew in a long, steadying breath and knocked.
The man who opened the door was pale and bald, his eyes vague and watery, with nothing of the malevolent deceit Danforth’s imagination had added to them. He had imagined Rache as still in the fullness of his youth, muscular and erect. To these characteristics, his mind had lately added features that were sometimes Slavic, sometimes Aryan, but always diabolically cruel and lit with low cunning. He knew that it was his hatred that had removed age and weariness and decrepitude from this portrait, and that in a thousand thousand ways other men did this every day, shading in the demonic in accordance with their fierce need for vengeance.
He was squinting hard, and by that squint, Danforth realized that the old man’s vision was so impaired he could probably see only a blur at his door.
“My car has broken down,” he told him in Spanish. “I wonder if I might use your phone.”
The old man nodded and opened the door wider.
Danforth stepped inside the house, then followed the old man into his cramped living quarters, a small room cluttered with books and papers, though what Danforth most noticed was a small table filled with an array of medications: sprays, ointments, pills, the full ordnance of old age.
There was a phone on a second table and the old man shuffled over to it, plucked the receiver from its cradle, and offered it to Danforth with a palsied hand that kept its cord dancing frantically.
Danforth faked a call, then handed the old man back the phone. “They’re sending someone,” he said.
The old man nodded toward a chair, a gesture indicating he should wait inside until help arrived. Then he slumped down in a ragged wicker chair, indicating with a similar nod that Danforth should do the same in the chair that rested opposite his.
“Ah,” the old man said.
A daughter living in New York, Danforth thought, and so he had had it all, this man: a wife, a child.
So he lived alone, Danforth thought, with a daughter far away.
Perfect.
Danforth noticed a large drinking mug, topped with a pewter flask. “That mug with the milkmaid,” he said in English. “I saw one like it in Germany.”
“Germany, yes,” the old man said with a smooth shift to English. “I was there during the war.”
