I found this a rather impressive display of insider knowledge, but more important, it raised the question of Danforth’s own wartime activities.
“Were you dropped?” I asked.
“Yes, but that was several years after my work with the Project had been completed,” Danforth answered. “My target was Sète, a little fishing village between Marseille and Barcelona, on the Mediterranean. The poet Paul Valery was born there. He said something I’ve often recalled over the years, that a poem is never finished, only abandoned. It’s the same with an ideal, I think, or a quest.” He shrugged. “Anyway, Sète was quite lovely, with its canals.”
“Why were you sent there?” I asked.
“To find out if Spain was truly neutral,” Danforth answered. “Which it was. Spain had already been bled white by its civil war. Besides, the Germans had nothing but contempt for the Spanish, and the Spanish knew it. ‘For the Germans, Africa begins at the Pyrenees,’ my Spanish contacts used to say. Meaning that Spain was Africa to them, impoverished and inept, unworthy of consideration.”
“Spanish contacts. You crossed into Spain?”
“Yes,” Danforth said. “I pretty much kept in the vicinity of Saragossa. My mission was to watch for any sign that arms were moving out of Spain and toward Vichy France.”
“Were you still with Anna at that time?” I asked.
And suddenly it was there, that little light going off, then on, then off again, and that seemed to flash distantly but insistently, like a warning signal at the entrance to a place Danforth both did and did not wish to go.
He lifted his glass, but rather than drink, he swirled the wine softly, gazing at its ruby glow. “No, I was not with Anna,” he said. His hand stopped and the wine’s surface calmed again. “Blood red,” he said, and appeared lost in that thought.
“The training,” I said in order to bring him back. “We were last at Winterset during Anna’s training.”
“Oh, yes,” Danforth said. “There was a good deal more training, of course. LaRoche was a genius at destruction.”
“Destruction?” I asked. “But he was only teaching her to use a pistol for self-defense, wasn’t he?”
“At first,” Danforth said. “But there were other skills to be learned.”
“What skills?”
“Those of a saboteur,” Danforth said. “The word comes from the Dutch, you know, from when Dutch workers threw their wooden shoes, their sabots, into the cogs of the textile machines that threatened their jobs.”
“So you never lost your interest in languages,” I said.
“No,” Danforth said. “Because words are important, Paul. Do you know how Sartre defined a Jew?”
I shook my head.
“As someone whom someone else calls a Jew,” Danforth answered. He looked at me sharply. “It was all in the word, never in the person.” He let this sink in, then added, “A word like that, Jew, is an explosive.”
The way Danforth pointedly made this remark gave me the impression that he had long been planning it and that other such remarks lay like mines in the road ahead.
“A word is an explosive,” I repeated, with no hint that I found the comment a trifle overdramatic, as well as trite.
“Yes,” Danforth said. “Which brings me back to Anna.”
~ * ~
Winterset, Connecticut, 1939
Danforth had watched during the past few weekends as the cellar of the house was converted into a sinister laboratory. LaRoche had set up tables and covered them with an array of materials. There were scores of glass bottles filled with various powders and liquids. He’d brought in brass scales as well, along with a black marble mortar and pestle. To these he’d added a large collection of items he thought might prove usefuclass="underline" a briefcase with a false bottom, a clock and several wristwatches, samples of European electrical switches, sundry dyes and polishes, and a supply of detonators. Each weekend had brought another lesson, and with each weekend, Anna had grown more adept in the secret arts of sabotage. There’d been more shooting lessons, as well as a great deal of training on the wireless LaRoche had unloaded from the back of his car the last week of February.
With each stage of Anna’s training, LaRoche grew more confident in her abilities, so in the last days of winter, he decided to take the final step.
“Today we’ll make a bomb,” he told Anna on that particular day.
He directed her over to a table on which he’d set various materials.
“This is potassium chlorate,” he said. “You can kill slugs with that, but it’s good for a bomb too.” He pointed to a glass jar filled with a white powder that looked as innocent as confectioners’ sugar. “That’s potassium nitrate. Plenty in fertilizer.” The next exhibit was potassium permanganate, which LaRoche said could be found in a common throat gargle. After that, he picked up a can of what appeared to be ordinary wood stain. “Ferric oxide in this.” The next can was silver paint. “In here you’ve got ground aluminum.” He gave an almost comic shrug. “It’s easy to find stuff for a bomb.”
But it was not enough merely to make a bomb, LaRoche added. For, once it was made, a bomb had to be hidden, and the best way to do this was to disguise it as something else.
“Like this,” he said as he picked up a large lump of coal. “Coal is soft. Very easy to carve out and place a bomb in. There’s coal everywhere in Europe. Big stacks in the basement, right by the boiler. Blow a building sky-high.”
Danforth envisioned the moment when Anna’s new courses of study all abruptly came together in a fiery explosion, a building shuddering somewhere in the heart of Europe, great tongues of flame climbing charred walls and leaping out of shattered windows; Anna would be some hours away at that point, he hoped, perhaps already set up in another town, connecting other fuses to other timers, preparing the next action.
By then he would have settled back into his work at Danforth Imports, he thought, be taking the usual calls, making the usual decisions. He’d be married to Cecilia, settled into the Connecticut house, perhaps with a baby on the way; he’d lounge in a spacious living room reading the latest report on the war in Europe while outside workmen raked fall leaves and plowed under the last of Cecilia’s summer garden.
Danforth couldn’t pinpoint why he found this vision of his future unsettling, though he knew it was more than simply his familiar sense that the most adventurous part of his life had already passed. There was something in the deeply serious nature of Anna’s training, as well as her tirelessness in learning LaRoche’s dark arts, that made him feel small and insignificant. He thought of the Apollonius statue of a pugilist at rest, its battered face and body. Here was a man who’d known the worst of it, who’d been seasoned by grave experience. It was not for nothing, Danforth admitted to himself, that there was no statue of the man who’d held his towel.