Quest for Anna Klein, The Page 6

  “So to you it seemed a farce,” he said in a tone that struck me as painfully searching, like a fish striving with all its wounded power to comprehend the hook.

  “But not to you, I take it?” I asked cautiously.

  For a moment Danforth gave no response, merely continued forward, though now with a slight tottering, as if he were seeking purchase on a perilous ledge. Then he said, “No, but I wish it had.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I might have grasped the truth.”

  “What truth?”

  “That the question was never whether she would live or die,” Danforth answered finally, his voice sounding cracked and worn with use, like the pages of old books, “for that had been decided long ago.”

  PART II

  The Point of a Spoon

  Century Club, New York City, 2001

  I had learned by then that Danforth strolled in and out of his story rather fluidly, as a man might drift from one room to another in a sprawling house. There was no fanfare attached to these transitions, nothing to signal a new chapter save a sudden play in his eyes, a tiny light going on or off. Anna seemed always a lingering presence in everything he said, a ghost that followed him no matter where he went. Or was he following the ghost, shifting here or there whenever she beckoned him with some gesture only he could see?

  For all that, once we reached the table reserved for him, Danforth made no mention of her but talked of the club’s furnishings until the waiter arrived. He ordered the beef Wellington and a glass of Bordeaux. I ordered prime rib and said no to the wine.

  “I need to keep my wits about me,” I explained.

  “Indeed you do,” Danforth said, and added quite pointedly, “especially now.”

  His words seemed darkly instructional, and he followed them with a brief speech about “desperate times” and “dangerous circumstances” that could easily lead to some rash action one might later regret, a disquisition that was quite broad and without specifics and yet still seemed intimately connected to his story. “One should never embrace a mental process that is a wall rather than a gate,” he said cryptically at one point. At another, he said, “The tragedy of human history is that it takes too long for gods to fail.”

  These were windy epigrams, but I dutifully wrote them down, a gesture he noted but didn’t seem to trust.

  Our lunches arrived. Danforth touched his wine to my water. “Bon appétit,” he said.

  We ate with little or no further discussion of the Project. Instead, Danforth rather insistently kept our conversation on my background. He wanted to know if I spoke any foreign language fluently. None fluently, I told him. I’d taken German in high school, as I’d mentioned, and picked up a little Spanish during visits to my grandfather in South America. For a time, Danforth tested what remained of my skills, but my Spanish proved so rudimentary that he finally said simply, “Well, back to English,” and from there inquired about my studies at Columbia and the career track I saw for myself in the future. Then, rather oddly, he commented on how life seemed to be a landscape marked by what he called “moral fault lines” to whose “subtle trembling” we should remain alert.

  Then, with lunch behind us, Danforth put down his fork and returned to the past.

  “To love not wisely, but too well,” he said. “That’s a moral fault that has many different aspects.”

  “A caution that comes from Shakespeare,” I said, rather obviously making the point that I’d read Othello.

  “To love a woman and not know who she is,” Danforth went on. “Or a man and not know what he did.” His gaze briefly intensified. “To love a cause but not know where it leads. They are different in many ways, but in one way they are the same.”

  “In what way the same?” I asked indulgently.

  “In that one simple parable can contain them all,” Danforth said.

  This was the second time Danforth had referred to his story as a parable, though now his reference seemed more complicated, as if he were trying to convince me that this would be a multilayered tale, at once sweeping and intimate, by turns adventure story, morality play, and God knows what else, but at its end a narrative worth my time. His need to make his case seemed rather sad to me, making me feel that, rather than being an intelligence analyst on assignment, I was a volunteer at an old-age home, sent to sit by the bed and feign rapt attention to some old duffer as he recalled the many Chevrolets he’d owned.

  Danforth appeared to see all this and so returned to the concrete aspects of his story.

  “After the war began, we could do it differently,” he said. “There was no need for secret training. We simply dropped people out of the sky.”

  He seemed still in awe and admiration of these night-bound, behind-the-lines jumpers, the courage their actions had required, and his voice began to show the old grief he felt, that so many had been lost.

  “It was amazing how little they carried, the ones who were dropped behind the lines once the war began,” he said. “An entrenching tool for burying the chute, a compass for finding your way. A pair of glasses for disguise. It’s quite surprising how well they work, Paul. Just a pair of spectacles with clear glass lenses. It gives you a totally different appearance.” He rolled his eyes upward slightly. “False identification, of course. One needed that. A map. Matches for secret writing. A little chocolate for energy. A razor. A dozen or so detonators if you were going to blow something up. A wireless to make reports.” He thought a moment, then added, “Oh, and a revolver . . . for that tight spot you dread.”

  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 Valéry 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 c
ogs 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 useful: 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 La Roche’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.

  This was a troubling thought, and so he was relieved when a ringing phone took him out of it. He turned away from Anna’s training and rushed up the cellar stairs. The phone rested on a stand near the front door.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “I’ve sent you a client,” Clayton told him. “He’s interested in French Impressionism. He thought you might have contacts in Paris. Be at the town bandstand. Two thirty. He’ll be wearing a light brown jacket. There’ll be a sprig of lavender in its lapel.”

  “Lavender?”

  Clayton laughed. “You remember those fields, don’t you, Tom?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “The bandstand,” Clayton repeated. “Two thirty.”

  Danforth returned the phone’s hand set to its cradle, walked out onto the broad front porch, and peered into the forest. Soon the trees would be bristling with green buds, and here and there the first leaves would begin to rustle in the warming air. Where, he wondered, would Anna be when the first flowers bloomed?

  Suddenly a noise came from the cellar, a small pop, tightly controlled and heavily muffled, followed by LaRoche’s hard laugh.

  Danforth wondered if Anna had laughed along with him, or at least allowed herself a smile, pretending for that brief moment that it was all a game.

  The drive to the town park was short, and it was only two o’clock, but Danforth saw no reason to remain at the house. He could take the valley road, the one that wound along a cold blue stream, and approach the town from an unexpected direction, as if his mind were now focused on surprise attack.

  On the drive into town, he thought of Anna. They’d had few conversations at work, and all of them had been on business matters. They never met outside business hours, save for the weekends at the house, during which LaRoche had kept her almost entirely to himself, teaching her skills that she then had to demonstrate over and over until the most complex procedures flowed from her with the technical fluidity of an old hand. From time to time the three of them shared meals together, but even then LaRoche focused the conversation on her training, asking her questions, noting her answers, sometimes nodding with satisfaction but otherwise keeping his opinion of her to himself, though Danforth supposed that he was reporting his evaluations to Clayton.

  So what did he know about this woman? Danforth asked himself now. Little beyond her steeliness and the fact that she was very bright. At the office, she quickly grasped every element of her training in imports, an intelligence Mrs. O’Rourke had mentioned on several occasions. At Winterset, she’d mastered Morse code and how to operate and repair a wireless with the same effortless alacrity with which she’d learned to fire a pistol and was now learning to make a bomb. He’d already noticed her astonishing ability to slip in and out of identities and to do it so quickly and completely that she seemed briefly to lose herself within them.

  But it was her skill at languages that had most impressed Danforth. In conversation with her, he enjoyed the way she could move seamlessly from one to the other. Once she’d told him that it was impossible to know a people if you did not know their language and that if she were granted many lives she would spend them learning yet more languages. But you will have only one life, he thought suddenly as he was driving into town, and then, with a sense of distress, he added, And perhaps quite a short one.

  Years later, as he stood in the bombed-out remains of Plötzensee Prison, Danforth remembered these thoughts, the way they’d come to him on the drive into town, and it occurred to him that love is, at bottom, simply the deepest of all sympathies, and that perhaps his love for Anna had begun the morning he’d watched her by the window and
thought of all the immigrant girls like her, the arduousness of their labor, their limited prospects, and seen Anna as somehow their representative in his life. Still later it had been her tenderness that called to him, as he remembered on that same bleak occasion, the shattered walls of the prison perfectly symbolic of his own shattered life; after that it had been her resolve that drew him, and following that, her sacrifice, so in the end it seemed impossible that a love built on such a multifarious foundation could ever crumble and then boil up again as ire.

  He reached the town in a few minutes. It was moving at its customarily slow pace as he drove down its single main street. There was a grocery store and a gas station, along with a clothing store and a five-and-dime. The town was typically American, quiet for the most part, and very neighborly. Danforth thought of the moment he’d committed himself to Clayton’s project and allowed himself to believe that by giving himself to that effort — even if only by providing small assistance — he was doing something to preserve and protect this little town and all the others like it. It might even be enough, though this possibility paled when he thought of Anna, the deadly skills she was being taught and would at some point employ. Providing a country house for her training was hardly at the same level.

  The bandstand was surrounded by a small park, and as he approached it, Danforth saw a man in a brown jacket make his way toward it from the opposite direction. The man wore a dark hat pulled down low, like the figure he’d seen outside his apartment window, and Danforth felt certain that it was, in fact, the same man.

  “So, French Impressionism,” Danforth said when he reached him.

  The other man appeared darkly amused. “These little games will seem silly to us one day.” His tone was nostalgic, as if, like Anna, he too had already glimpsed his fate. He offered his hand. “I’m Ted Bannion.”

  Bannion, Danforth thought, an Irish name. Unlike LaRoche, this man seemed well suited to his name, with his light hair and blue eyes, along with something in his manner that made it easy for Danforth to picture him in the execution yard of Kilmainham Gaol, shoulder to shoulder with Connolly and Pearce.