Quest for Anna Klein, The Read online

  Century Club, New York City, 2001

  “That’s an odd reference,” I said. “O. Henry. ‘The Gift of the Magi.’ Are you religious?”

  “Not then or now,” Danforth answered. “But we lived in a culturally coherent world, Clayton and I, a world of shared symbols and references. Old Testament. New Testament.”

  “A coherence our current enemies now have in abundance,” I added coldly. “But which we have somewhat lost.”

  Danforth shrugged. “True enough, but would you want it back if you got the Duke of Alva with it too?”

  I had no idea who the Duke of Alva was but saw no need to demonstrate that lack of familiarity, and so I said, “Meaning what?”

  “That it’s easy to become what you once abhorred,” Danforth answered.

  This struck me as rather windy, and probably a quote. I returned to the more relevant subject at hand. “So, Clayton had made his proposal,” I said. “What did you do then?”

  “Despite the snow, I started walking uptown,” Danforth answered. “On the way, I thought about the young woman, about what she was willing to do. And I thought about myself. I even thought about O. Henry. I was still turning all that over in my mind when I got to the Plaza.”

  Pulitzer Fountain, New York City, 1939

  Danforth paused briefly at the fountain in front of the Plaza and thought over his conversation with Clayton. Something had changed and he knew it. A small door had been pried open in him. Perhaps that was Clayton’s gift, that he could sense the locked door inside you and find a key to it.

  He fixed his attention on the horse-drawn carriages that slowly made their way in and out of the park. The rhythmic beat of the hooves was muffled, and yet the sound was compelling, a soft, romantic dirge. Most of the passengers were young, and Danforth supposed a good many of them were on their honeymoons. He believed the world was indeed hurtling toward cataclysm, just as Clayton had said, but it would not occur tonight, not for these well-heeled newlyweds in their romantic haze. Soon he would be among them, he thought, newly married and in a carriage with Cecilia, a settled man in a profoundly unsettled world.

  He’d walked the entire distance from Gramercy Park, and as he’d walked, a little seed grew in his mind, its roots sinking down and down until he could feel its feathery tendrils wrapping around him.

  Abruptly he recalled Razumov, Conrad’s dazed and fumbling revolutionary, how he’d been drawn into a deadly intrigue acci-dentally, his fate entering his room, he said, because his landlady turned her head. Danforth knew that he was not at all like Razumov. If he chose to be an actor in Clayton’s project, it would be his choice, not one that the blind play of circumstance had thrust upon him.

  His mind shifted again, and he imagined the young woman at the Old Town in quite a different bar, a little Bleecker Street dugout with sawdust on the floor, the woman surrounded by what he assumed must be her type of friends: would-be writers, painters, musicians, all of them young revolutionaries, probably Communists, the entire lot wriggling in the fist of hard times, talking life and art and politics, quoting Marx, Engels, Lenin while they sipped cheap beer and ate whatever the bar provided. He wondered if she was in any way different from such starry-eyed idealists, if she had remotely glimpsed the executioner’s wall through the fog of their windy dialectics, sensed, whether she’d read Saint-Just or not, that revolutions devour their children.

  There could be no answer to this, of course. He’d seen only the crazy show of this young woman, and now he doubted if even the curls of her hair were real. Perhaps she was all performance, enjoying the night’s little vignette but in the end lacking the stuff needed to carry out the mission — whatever it was — that Clayton had in mind.

  As if he were pushed by an anxious hand, he stepped away from the fountain, crossed Fifth Avenue, and headed toward his apartment on Park.

  His father lived in the same building, and as had become his custom, Danforth looked in on him before going to his own apartment.

  His father answered the door immediately.

  “You shouldn’t have bothered coming here tonight,” he said when he saw Danforth. “You need your rest. You have a meeting with Akmet tomorrow at seven.”

  Although the elder Danforth had increasingly removed himself from the daily affairs of the business, he kept a close eye on how it was run, especially any dealings with Akmet, whom he considered little more than a Bedouin trader with a knife up his sleeve.

  “The appointment was changed to ten,” Danforth told him.

  “So Akmet is feeling his years at last,” the senior Danforth said with a small laugh. “Would you like a drink?”

  Danforth nodded.

  His father stepped out of the doorway and motioned him inside.

  They walked into the front room of the apartment. A large window opened onto the night-bound city. The twinkling lights of its distant buildings looked like a rain of stars halted in their fall.

  Danforth’s father poured two scotches, handed one to his son. He was a tall man, lean and fit. It was easy to imagine him as a figure in ages past, the captain of a great vessel, standing on the bridge and plotting his course by the stars; this was precisely what the first Danforth men had been, and by their intrepid scouring of the world, the family fortune had originated. They had sailed the roughest seas, hacked their way through jungle depths, staggered across desert wastes, been shot by muskets and arrows and even poison darts, and suffered all manner of tropical fevers. Compared to these intrepid forebears, Danforth had lived a pampered life, as he well knew, safe and secure in his Manhattan apartment, a student of languages, for God’s sake, with no claim to being different from a thousand other rich boys. A line from Pope crossed his mind, something about how much son from sire degenerates.

  “You seem a bit tired,” his father said. “Long day?”

  Danforth turned to face the window. Below, the sweep of Central Park gave off an eerie glow in the streetlights. “I was thinking of the Balkans,” he said. “Those thieves who stopped our train.”

  His father took a sip of scotch. “Why would you think of that?”

  Danforth recalled the young woman at the Old Town Bar, the peril she would be in should she really go to Europe. “Maybe it’s because I haven’t made any memories in a long time,” he said. “You know what I mean? Real memories. Something searing, that you’ll never forget.”

  His father laughed. “Count yourself lucky,” he said. “Most lasting memories are bad.”

  Count yourself lucky, Danforth repeated in his mind, and he knew he should do precisely that, but he also knew that in some strange, inexpressible way, he couldn’t consider his good fortune entirely good.

  He left his father’s apartment a few minutes later, slept uneasily, went to work the next morning. Outside his offi ce, the file clerks and secretaries busied themselves as usual. Dear old Mrs. O’Rourke was as attentive to him as ever, filling out his itinerary, screening his calls, making the appointments she deemed necessary, handing off various salesmen and solicitors to Mr. Fellows, the offi ce manager, or Mr. Stans, the chief shipping clerk, doling out Danforth’s time frugally, as she knew he wanted.

  In that way, the week went by, the weekend arrived, and he met Cecilia at a restaurant across from Gramercy Park, not far from the corner where he’d spoken to Clayton the week before and then been left to ponder his friend’s final question.

  “Snowing again,” he said almost to himself as he glanced out the window toward the park.

  Cecilia unfolded the menu and peered at it closely. “I think I’ll have a Waldorf salad,” she said. “What about you?”

  “Caesar salad,” he told her.

  The waiter stepped up, and they selected their entrées, Cecilia her fish, Danforth his chicken.

  “And to drink?” the waiter asked.

  Danforth chose a pouilly-fuissé, then handed the wine list back to the waiter.

  “Very good, sir,” the waiter said as he stepped away.

  Ce
cilia reached behind her head.

  Danforth knew she was checking for errant strands of hair.

  “You look perfect,” he assured her.

  She dropped her hand into her lap. “The Vassar reunion is on Saturday. Do you want to come?”

  “Of course.”

  “It’ll be the first time I introduce you as my fiancé.”

  She seemed pleased and happy, and her happiness made Dan-forth happy too. For a moment, they smiled at each other, as happy couples do, and in that instant Danforth reaffi rmed to himself his love for her, his commitment to the life they would share.

  The wine came and they toasted their future together, and everything seemed perfect until Danforth glanced out the window, where he saw a young girl fling a handful of snow at a passing stranger; at that instant, he thought of the woman in the bar and found himself imagining her somewhere in the dark grove beyond the window, a lone figure moving away from him until she disappeared . . .

  Century Club, New York City, 2001

  “. . . into the snow,” Danforth said softly.

  He paused and looked toward the window, the snow now falling a little heavier than before. “When is your flight back to Washington, Paul?”

  “Not for a few hours,” I answered, though I feared that even this generous stretch of time wouldn’t be enough to finish what was turning into a much more leisurely interview than I’d planned.

  “So,” I said crisply. “You were at Gramercy Park again. In a restaurant with your fiancée. You were looking out the window of the restaurant, out into the park, thinking about —”

  “Thinking about myself, actually,” Danforth interrupted. He took a sip from his glass. “Have you ever read The Riddle of the Sands?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “I suppose I was a bit like Carruthers in that book,” Danforth told me. “Youth can be a cruel lash, you know. Sometimes a lash you suffer. Sometimes a lash you wield.” He looked for some response to this, but when I gave none, he continued. “Anyway, I called Clayton later that night, after that dinner with Cecilia. I told him that I was interested in the Project. He didn’t seem surprised. But I wasn’t entirely convinced, I told him. I wanted to meet with Lingua. He arranged for us to get together at one of those dimly lit grog houses they still have down on Fourth Avenue.”

  “And when you met her,” I asked with a sly smile, “was she . . . Mata Hari?”

  “She was pretty, if that’s what you mean,” Danforth said with perfect seriousness. “But that wasn’t what I most noticed about her.”

  “What did you notice?”

  Danforth paused, then said, “How shall I put it?” Once again he appeared to retreat to that earlier time. “That she already seemed to be looking back at life from the bottom of her grave.”

  Dugout Bar, New York City, 1939

  Danforth arrived first and proceeded to a booth at the far corner of the bar. He’d come to have serious reservations about the meeting, along with even greater ones about getting involved with Clayton’s no-doubt-inflated idea of influencing history. What scheme could possibly do that?

  But for all that, he couldn’t deny that he felt a certain anticipation with regard to this meeting; when he saw her come through the front door of the bar, he felt a quickening.

  “Hello,” she said when she reached him.

  She sat, drew her arms out of her coat, and let it fall behind her back, then she folded her scarf and laid it beside her on the bench, all of this done as if she thought herself alone in the booth. Her gaze was still cast down when she said, “No snow this time.”

  There was an olive undertone to her skin that made her look faintly Sicilian; her features were at once delicate and inexpressibly strong, and there was a penetrating sharpness to her gaze.

  “My name is Thomas Danforth,” he told her.

  “Anna Klein.”

  Klein, Danforth thought. It meant “small” in German, and therefore seemed quite appropriate to the woman who sat across from him. He recalled that Clayton had said she was a genius with languages, and he decided to test the waters. “Konnen wir sprechen Deutsch?” he asked.

  “Wie sie wunschen.”

  For the next few minutes they spoke only German, Danforth’s considerable fluency matched by hers.

  “Where did you learn German?” Danforth asked her when he returned to English.

  “I pick up languages very easily,” Anna answered without elaboration.

  “And you speak French too?” Danforth asked.

  “Yes,” Anna said. “Voulez-vous parler en Français?”

  Danforth nodded and they switched to French, and after that to Spanish, and after that to Italian, and in all three cases Anna spoke with a fluency that astonished him.

  “How many languages do you speak?” he asked in English.

  “Nine,” Anna answered but did not list them.

  “You live in the city?”

  She nodded crisply. “The Lower East Side.”

  Danforth’s father had called her neighborhood “the squalid kingdom of the Jews,” and as she lowered her eyes, Danforth considered the long history of her people’s persecutions: the false accusations made against them — that they poisoned wells and sacrificed Gentile children — the hundreds of sacked and burning villages they’d fled, the wintry forests in which they’d hidden, boiling tree bark for their soup.

  The barmaid arrived. Danforth ordered a scotch, but Anna merely waved her hand. “Thank you, nothing for me,” she said.

  “Not a drinker?” Danforth asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “I admire your discipline,” Danforth said, meaning it half as a joke. He shrugged. “I suppose you know that I’ve been asked to provide a place where you can be trained.”

  One of her tiny brown hands inched over and covered the other. “Yes,” she answered, then suddenly leaned forward. “Why did you want to meet me?” she asked quite determinedly and in a way that radically shifted what had seemed a secure balance of power: Danforth was now the one being evaluated, she the one with favors to grant.

  “To satisfy myself, I suppose,” he answered. “I wanted to make sure you were a serious person.”

  “And are you satisfied that I am?” she asked.

  Her frankness surprised him, as did her impatience to get on with whatever task lay before her.

  “Yes,” Danforth answered quickly, though it was not until that moment that he realized he was. “I’m not being asked to do very much, after all.”

  “So we’ll use your place for the training?” Anna asked.

  Danforth nodded.

  She rose and began to gather her things, her movements quick but precise, not at all like the antic twitches of the character she’d played when he’d first seen her at the Old Town Bar.

  “I thought we might have dinner,” Danforth said.

  She shook her head. “I have work.”

  With that she reached for her coat, drew out an envelope, and offered it to Danforth. “I’m to give you this. It’s from Clayton.”

  Danforth took the envelope from her, and as he took it, he noted how small her hand was, how nearly doll-like and delicate, the slenderness of her bones. “Do you know what’s in here?” he asked.

  She nodded as she put on her coat. “The next step,” she said.

  Century Club, New York City, 2001

  Here Danforth paused and drew in a slow breath.

  “There are symbolic gestures, Paul,” he said. “They may be small, like taking that envelope from Anna’s hand, but they have the force of moral commitment.”

  “Like that line Travis drew in the dust at the Alamo,” I said.

  “There’s no actual proof that that ever happened,” Danforth said. “But it doesn’t matter. And yes, my taking that envelope from Anna’s hand was like that, a gesture that states quite clearly that from this moment on, there will be no turning back.” He paused again, then added, “With that simple gesture I committed myself to the
Project. Not just to the rather unspectacular thing I’d been asked to do for it, provide a house in the country, but to the Project as a whole. It turned out to be a good thing, since Clayton was already asking me to take another step — to provide a cover identity for Anna — which I did after I read the note inside the envelope.” He took a sip from his drink. “And so the next day, following the instructions in that note, I put an ad for a special assistant in the classified section of the New York Times. The applicant’s only requirement was that he or she had to be available for extended service abroad and be familiar with several languages.” He smiled softly but warily; he briefly appeared to me like a child being led into a dark wood.

  “Then I waited,” he said.

  Danforth Imports, New York City, 1939

  Over the next few days, applicants for the special-assistant position came and went, mostly young men with sparkling credentials, some of whom were quick to mention their distinguished families and the prestigious schools they had attended. Fraternities were brought up, as were summers in the Hamptons or on Cape Cod. It was clear to Danforth that some of the applicants viewed importation as an attractive career choice, perhaps even, oddly enough, a step toward acquiring a position in the State Department. Several of these young men had traveled extensively, and all spoke at least one foreign language, though their proficiencies varied widely. Most were eager to be employed, though Danforth knew that very few of them would go hungry as a result of being out of work.

  But a few less well-heeled applicants also showed up, always in suits they’d bought off the rack. These were first-generation men who had no claim to any distinctions they had not won by their own efforts. Danforth admired them in a way he could not admire the others or himself, and he would have hired them to fill other positions if any had been available. He liked the cut of them, their modest style, even the slightly beleaguered quality they tried to hide.