“Where did you meet Clayton?” Danforth asked.
“At one of his talks at the library,” Bannion said. “He seemed to think that the wealthy had an obligation to do something. I had an idea of what that might be.”
“I still don’t know what the Project is, by the way,” Danforth told him.
“With any luck, you never will,” Bannion said flatly.
“It’s very ambitious, I’m sure,” Danforth said. “Clayton’s not one for small measures.”
“Very ambitious, yes,” Bannion said, clearly refusing to reveal any part of the Project. “Has he told you that I was a Communist?”
“No.”
“Oh, yes, I was a great singer of the ‘Internationale,’” Bannion said with edgy bitterness. “One of those kind of Communists.” He appeared still seared by the experience, a man cheated by a clever swindler. “I wasted years of my life marching under that banner.” Those lost years were obviously a source of deep resentment; Bannion seemed raw and charged with violence, a man who’d caught the only woman he had ever loved sleeping with another man. “Clayton prefers people whose gods have failed,” he added.
“What god failed Anna?” Danforth asked.
To that question, Bannion gave the saddest answer Danforth had ever heard.
“Life.”
Danforth felt that this was true and wondered if it was in this terrible failure she had found the steeliness he saw in her.
“Anna’s going to be brought in earlier than we thought,” Bannion told him. “Clayton wanted me to tell you this in person. So that we could meet. You won’t have further dealings with her once she leaves for Europe.”
So she would be a bird in his life, Danforth thought, a bird for whom he had briefly provided a nest and who would soon take flight and then simply disappear over the horizon.
“When is she leaving?” he asked.
“We’d like her in place within a few weeks. No later than mid-May.”
“Why the hurry?”
“Because things are heating up, as I’m sure you’re aware,” Bannion answered.
“Where is she going?”
“There’s no need for you to know that,” Bannion answered. A disquiet surfaced in his eyes, as if he’d suddenly spotted trouble in the distance. “And once she’s gone, you should never mention her to anyone.”
“I understand,” Danforth said. “I’ll never say her name again.”
Bannion gave no hint of how he received this declaration, only glanced to the right, where a beat-up sedan had come to a halt at the far end of the park. There were two men in the front seat and one in the back, a configuration that appeared to draw Bannion’s grim attention. He waited until one of the men got out and walked into a nearby store, then he turned back to Danforth. “You should be aware that they may already be onto the Project,” he said. “And if so, they’ll stop at nothing. So right now, all of us have to watch our backs, because they could be anyone, anywhere.”
Danforth found this assertion slightly paranoid. “Who is this mysterious ‘they’?” he asked doubtfully.
“German sympathizers, of course,” Bannion answered. “The type who break up anti-German rallies. If they find out what we’re doing, they’ll do whatever has to be done to stop it.” Bannion looked at Danforth in a way that made Bannion’s doubts about him quite plain. “So the point is to get Anna in place before anyone has a chance to betray her.”
“I would never betray her,” Danforth said firmly.
Bannion’s smile was hard to read. “Let’s hope you’re never tested.”
With that he turned and made his way across the wintry park.
There was something both comforting and scary in his determined stride, Danforth thought, the robotic severity of a man who could be trusted to do whatever had to be done, no matter how extreme. Such was the way of men whose Great Ideal had failed them, he supposed, and in that failure left scar tissue on their souls.
With Bannion gone, Danforth had no reason to remain in the park, but he found himself compelled to linger there awhile. He did not know why, save that the park gave him a sense of comfort, of rootedness. The bandstand was freshly painted, the perfect symbol of a small town whose inhabitants had no reason to mistrust the world. The still-naked trees, the distant swings, the small fountain, all of it now seemed terribly vulnerable, a naive realm that had to be protected by men like Bannion, who he suddenly imagined as quite capable of anything. This had not come from what Bannion had said but from the flinty nature of the exchange, the dead earnestness he’d seen in Bannion’s eyes. Danforth knew that in a less perilous time, he would have been the last to entrust any aspect of his country’s good to such a man. But now history seemed to demand the Bannions of the world, men without reserve, men without limits, men who cared little for the usual dictates of governance and who made those who could be ruled by them seem weak and dithering.
Ah, so this is what it feels like, he thought as Bannion got into the car at the far end of the park, to lose your innocence.
~ * ~
Century Club, New York City, 2001
I felt a pang of disappointment. To lose his innocence? Was this to be Danforth’s story, some little moment of moral quavering? If so, it was familiar in the extreme. Worse, it was irrelevant, since Danforth’s personal transformation, however trivial or profound, had nothing to offer in terms of useful tactical information. I could almost hear Dr. Carlson, my superior at the center, fire off the inevitable question: Is that all you got out of him, a tired tale of lost innocence?
“Innocence,” I said blandly, “that’s a hard thing to nail down, don’t you think?”
Danforth picked up the dessert menu. “Not in terms of knowing who they actually are,” he said. “We always know who the innocent are.”
“But as a concept, it’s somewhat complicated, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Only when it should more accurately be called naiveté,” Danforth said. “I had a contact in the French Resistance.” He continued to peruse the menu as he spoke. “He was of no great value. A courier, not much more. He was arrested and taken to Hotel Lutetia. Do you know it?”
I shook my head.
“It’s at forty-five boulevard Raspail,” Danforth went on. “During the war it served as Gestapo headquarters in Paris, and so there were quite a few interrogation rooms. Augustin was taken to one of these rooms, of course. He was interrogated for a while. There were a lot of people screaming in his face and a few stinging slaps, but nothing really unbearable. He didn’t know anything, so he couldn’t tell them anything. After a time, the treatment became more severe, and before it was over he was pretty well broken.” He looked up from the menu. “The apple tart isn’t bad.”