Quest for Anna Klein, The Read online

  “Clayton has never mentioned you,” Danforth said.

  Bannion plucked the sprig of lavender from the lapel of his jacket and tossed it onto the ground, as if to demonstrate his distance from such foolish trappings.

  “I’ll be in charge of Anna once her training is finished,” Bannion said.

  “She’s being trained for lots of things, it seems,” Danforth said cautiously, hoping he might get some hint as to what the Project actually was.

  “So that she can train others,” Bannion said by way of explanation. His smile was bleak. “Our Joan of Arc.”

  This seemed a hint that the Project was much broader than Danforth had previously imagined, Anna not one of a small cadre but the spearhead of a large force.

  “Train them in several different languages,” Bannion added.

  His accent was very faint, Danforth thought, and it seemed layered with other inflections, like a voice behind a mask.

  “That’s her greatest asset,” Bannion said.

  “Not her courage?” Danforth asked.

  Bannion shrugged. “There’s never a shortage of courage,” he said. “It’s skill that’s hard to find.” He appeared sad that this was the case, that humanity was very good at meeting danger, very poor at knowing what to do about it. A realization of this fallen state, mankind nobly brave but helplessly incompetent, swam into his eyes, and Danforth thought it gave him the look of a disappointed god.

  “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.”

  I nodded.

  Danforth returned to the menu, studying it thoughtfully as he continued. “All of this shouting and slapping was done by Germans.”

  He put down the menu and summoned the waiter. “The apple tart for me. And you, Paul?”

  “I’ll have the same.”

  The waiter stepped away.

  “Out of the blue, a uniformed Paris policeman came into the room,” Danforth continued. “And do you know what went through Augustin’s mind? It’s over. That’s what he thought. Here is a French policeman. He will stop this immediately. What a wonderful thing to have believed.” His smile was anything but cheerful. “And how much more wonderful had it been true.” He paused, eyeing me closely, then went on. “But the French policeman simply stood at attention and watched a little more rough treatment, this time with cigarettes. I’m sure you know what I mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “And when one of Augustin’s torturers took out a fresh cigarette to continue the game, this same French policeman clicked his heels and dutifully stepped over and lit it for him.” He looked at me starkly. “Now that is a loss of innocence, Paul, a loss of belief in your own countrymen that makes my slight moral twinges by the bandstand entirely laughable.”

  I was relieved to hear this, since it was at one with my earlier thought and gave me to understand that wherever Danforth’s tale ultimately led, it would not be to some effete notion of wounded idealism.

  “You’re right,” I said confidently. “Perspective gets lost in little moral misgivings.”

  “Do you think so, Paul?” Danforth asked. “I’m more of a mind to think that perspective gets lost in moral certainties.” He shrugged. “Which only means that no one was ever burned at the stake by a doubter.”

  Before I could reply to this curious remark, Danforth eased back slightly, and for a moment he seemed uncertain as to how he should proceed. “So much in life comes as a surprise,” he added softly, and I knew he was once again moving down the twisty path of his tale. “Things we were so sure of. People we thought we knew so well but perhaps did not know at all.” He added nothing to this; instead, he craned his neck slightly, so that I heard the brittle grind of ancient bones.

  “Old gears,” he said. “No oil can smooth them.” Then, again moving down a familiar trail, he returned to that long-ago afternoon. “She was in the woods when I got back from the bandstand,” he said.

  Winterset, Connecticut, 1939

  She was in the woods when Danforth got back to Winterset. He caught only fleeting glimpses of her as she moved through line after gently swaying line of slender trees. She was walking slowly, as he would time and again recall, dressed in a dark blouse and a long equally dark skirt that fell below her ankles. She’d flattened her wild hair beneath the Old-World babushka common to the women he’d seen toiling in the frozen fields of Eastern Europe. In that way she suddenly seemed beyond any future assimilation, a woman fiercely, almost willfully, separated from himself and that part of his country that was most like him.

  And yet, it was this that inexplicably attracted him, the allure of something so foreign it called to him in the way of indecipherable languages, and that returned him to the haunting wonder of his boyhood days. She was like a city he didn’t know but wanted to, a vista he’d never seen but yearned to see. Bannion had been right. There was no shortage of courage. Every battlefield was strewn with it. But he sensed in Anna a fatalism she had long ago accepted, making her seem like a woman walking toward her future just as religious martyrs walked toward their execution sites, as if there, and only there, they would find fulfillment.

  “Don’t get lost,” he said when he reached her. “These woods are deep.”

  “I never wander far,” she replied.

  He leaned against one of the trees and glanced back toward the house. “No more training today?”

  “No, there’s more,” she answered.

  She added nothing else, her silence like a cloak around her shoulders.

  “You may be going earlier than we’d thought,” he told her.

  She nodded, and an errant strand of hair broke free from the scarf and curled at the side of her right ear.

  “No second thoughts?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  With that, she turned away from him, and for a moment continued to face away, her features now in profile, her attention focused on the stone bridge in the distance.

  “Do you want to walk over there?” Danforth asked.

  She nodded, and together they made their way out of the grove and into the wilder woods, with its newly sprouting undergrowth, and finally to the bridge.

  During the awkward silence that followed, he made a point of not looking at her.

  At last he said, “What are you thinking about?”

  She stared out over the stream. “Ellis Island,” she said. “The view from my window.”

  “Your window?”

  She nodded. “I had trachoma, so I had to stay on the island for a while. My bed was near a window. I could see the big buildings. It was like a make-believe city. Especially at night. The lights fell like fireworks, only frozen.”

  “Very different from where you came from?” Danforth asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you leave your native country?”

  “To escape the killing,” Anna said.

  Danforth imagined the smoldering villages of the Pale, a half a million Jews crowded into small-town ghettos where they periodically fell victim to renegades of every sort, bandits and gangs of deserters. It was a vast region through which he’d traveled with his father as a boy and through which he would pass again as a man, after the war, those same crowded villages now emptied of their Jews.

  She faced him. “How about you?” she asked. “Clayton says you went everywhere when you were a child. What was the most beautiful thing you ever saw?”

  He told her about Umbria, the village of Assisi, the valley that swept out from the terraces of the town, how beautiful it was, almost unreal.

  “When I remember it, I see it more as a painting,” he said at the end of his description.

  Anna’s gaze fell toward the swiftly flowing water. “And what’s the most beautiful thing you’ve never seen?” she asked.

  It was an odd question, Danforth thought, but he had an answer for it.

  “According to my father, it’s the Seto Sea from Mount Misen,” he said. “He saw it, and said it was like a dream.”

  “Where is it?” Anna asked.

  “Japan,” Danforth answered. “On a little island called Miyajima.”

  “Then you must go there,” she said. She glanced toward the house. “I’d better be getting back. LaRoche is waiting.”

  They turned and together walked to the house; in the distance, Danforth could see LaRoche standing on the porch, watching them.

  “We still have a lot of work,” LaRoche said to Anna when they reached him.

  Danforth saw that LaRoche had already been told that Anna was to leave quite soon, though there was no hint that this speeded-up schedule disturbed him. And yet in the following days, small cracks began to appear in LaRoche’s otherwise granite exterior. Danforth noticed it in the way he grew more tender toward Anna during their sessions, and in the way his voice lost its coldness, a change in manner that made him appear almost fatherly in regard to her. He might have been teaching her to ride a bike, Danforth thought, or erect a tent, or any of a hundred other innocuous skills, and he sensed that LaRoche had come to fear for her and so had grown more gentle, as a parent might be more gentle with a child stricken by some dread disease.

  Some two weeks later, Danforth and LaRoche sat alone in the front room, enjoying the final cigars of the evening. LaRoche had drunk considerably more than usual, and in that loosened state, he began to talk about the old ki
ngdom of Azerbaijan, where he’d spent some time in the region’s busy trade-route capital of Baku.

  “It was all silk and saffron then,” LaRoche said in a nearly musical way that suggested he’d heard these words in a song. His eyes closed with an intoxicated languor. “With towers and minarets, and plenty of oil too. Like Texas.” He leaned back, more relaxed than Danforth had ever seen him. “Everybody well fed. Even the camels.” He laughed. “Especially the camels.” Suddenly his face soured. “Then the czar stuck in his nose. The Azeris and the Armenians started cutting one another’s throats.” He stubbed out his cigar with the violence of one who knew what had been consumed in these ethnic fires. “And after the czar, the Bolsheviks.”

  For a moment he seemed lost in a blasted idyll. Briefly, he watched a curl of blue smoke rise from the smoldering cigar. Then he grabbed his scotch and downed it in a single, tortured gulp.

  “She’s a good woman, Anna,” he said, then rose to his feet and walked out the door.

  Danforth sensed that he was being summoned, that LaRoche had something to tell him. He walked onto the front porch, where LaRoche stood.

  It was an overcast evening, neither moon nor stars, and so solid darkness surrounded them. Danforth could barely make out LaRoche’s features, barely tell that another body stood near his, save for the labored sound of LaRoche’s breath and the liquor he smelled on it.

  “Maybe I’m getting old,” LaRoche said in a voice that was hardly above a whisper. “Maybe I’m seeing things.”

  “What things?” Danforth asked.

  “Men,” LaRoche said. “Never the same ones.”

  “Are you telling me that you’re being followed?” Danforth asked.

  LaRoche shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “Have you told anyone else about this?” Danforth asked.

  LaRoche shook his head.

  “I’ll speak to Clayton,” Danforth assured him.