The Quest for Anna Klein Page 8

  “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.

  “Good,” LaRoche said. “Maybe you take Anna somewhere else. Someplace so I don’t know where she is.” He paused, started to continue, then hesitated, making Danforth sense that he was about to hear a secret LaRoche had revealed to very few. “It’s easy to break a man.” For a time, he didn’t speak. When at last he did, the words fell like toppling headstones. “All gone, Kruševo.”

  Kruševo, Danforth thought, and it all suddenly came clear. The ten-day republic.

  One of Danforth’s Far East business associates had been in Macedonia when the Kruševo rebellion began, and he had more than once related the horrors of its suppression, Turkish atrocities piled one upon the other like bodies in a lorry. They’d razed towns and farms, cut a blood-soaked swath of terror through the region and put thousands to flight, a pitiable throng, bitter and defeated, doomed to be forever homeless, and no doubt among whose dispirited number had been LaRoche himself.

  “A man will break under the lash,” LaRoche murmured softly, and now Danforth was unsure of whether LaRoche had suffered the outrages of Kruševo or inflicted them.

  Danforth started to speak, but LaRoche suddenly whirled around and grabbed his arm in a tight grip. “Clayton should hide Anna,” he said emphatically “He should hide her soon.” Even in the darkness, LaRoche’s eyes glittered with the cold sparkle of broken glass. “And tell no one where she is.”

  Danforth said nothing. LaRoche’s voice, drunken though it was, had been so fierce and heartrending that in the wake of his words, as the two men lingered in the night, silent and enclosed, he felt himself more adrift than ever in this new, darker world where nothing seemed entirely within anyone’s control.

  ~ * ~

  Century Club, New York City, 2001

  “Perhaps a glass of port, Paul?” Danforth asked. He’d stopped his story abruptly and now daintily touched the corners of his mouth with a napkin. “Or are you afraid it might dull your senses?”

  I took this as something of a challenge, one I felt I should meet.

  “I think I can handle a port,” I said.

  “Good,” Danforth said, his smile quite bright for one who’d just related such an ominous exchange. “A port it shall be.” He summoned the waiter and ordered two glasses of a port I didn’t recognize but, given Danforth’s refinements of taste, assumed was excellent.

  “Did Clayton do it?” I asked once the waiter had stepped away.

  “Do what?”

  “Hide Anna.”

  “No, but I did tell him what Bannion had told me at the bandstand and about the conversation with LaRoche, how worried they both had been. But Clayton decided to keep to the same road at the moment. He said Anna would be headed for Europe soon anyway. Until then, he thought her quite safe. Bannion was always overstating things, he said, and LaRoche had grown ridiculously close to Anna and was acting unprofessionally. Besides, he was sure no one had caught on to the Project.”

  “That’s all he said?”

  “Yes, and he was very convincing,” Danforth said. “Clayton was always very convincing. And what he said was true. You can’t run an operation if you react to every fear.”

  In order to keep vaguely to my mission, I asked a technical question. “What should you react to?”

  “Doubt,” Danforth said. “If you suddenly feel a quaver of uncertainty, you should look closely at what caused it.”

  “Did you feel such a quaver?” I asked. “In terms of the Project, I mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “Caused by what?”

  “Clayton,” Danforth answered. “He was concerned about Anna, her many guises. We were moving closer to the time when she would be sent to Europe, and so he wanted to be sure of her.”

  “Sure of her?”

  “Who she was,” Danforth said. “Sure of her story. Bannion had given Clayton a full account of himself. All those years he worked for the Communists. Strikes he’d been involved in. Organizing. He’d even gone to fight in the Spanish civil war. After that, his disillusionment. He’d tried to switch sides completely, become an informer against his old comrades. Clayton had checked out every detail of Bannion’s story and knew he’d told him the truth. But Anna’s past was more obscure, so he wanted to make certain of her. It’s the small lies that trip you up, so that was the place to start, he said. Her story about being on Ellis Island, for example, of being held there because she had trachoma. There would be records of something like that. It would be possible to find out of she’d actually been there.”

  “Had she?”

  “Yes,” Danforth answered. A mood of reflection suddenly settled over him as the waiter brought our port. “I went there many years ago,” he continued when the waiter left. “The hospital had been closed for decades by then, of course. The windows were broken and everything was open to the sea air. The room where she’d once been kept was littered with debris and there were piles of dead leaves in the corners.”

  “You went to her actual room?” I asked.

  “It was a ward, but yes, I went there,” Danforth answered. “She’d remembered exactly her view from her window. She was able to describe it accurately. It was rather simple to locate the room, a matter of angles.”

  Danforth was not one for drawing word pictures, but I suddenly imagined the scene, an old man in a black cashmere overcoat, his hands deep in his pockets, alone in an abandoned hospital room, the ghostly image of a little girl no doubt playing in his mind: the child dressed in a hospital gown, sitting on the side of a bed, her skin olive, and with wildly curly hair.

  “Everything is a matter of coordinates, Paul, of intersections,” Danforth continued. “Standing in the room where Anna had been kept on Ellis Island, thinking in that abandoned room of that little girl, knowing all I’d learned by then, it was easy to gather the coordinates of her experience. A person is like a leaf. You pick it up. You hold it up to the sun, note the veins, how they spread out from the central stem, and suddenly, it’s all there. What she was. What she did. Why she did it. Everything.”

  He stopped abruptly, and something in his demeanor, a raw sadness, told me simply to wait until he spoke again.

  “Anyway,” he said afte
r a long moment. “Clayton wanted me to get to know her a little better and report back to him. And so I decided to see her under less formal circumstances. Not just in the office or at the house, but in a more ... intimate setting.” He took a quick sip of port. “Have you ever heard of Vera Atkins?”

  I shook my head.

  “During the war she ran a secret operation out of England,” Danforth said. “Women were smuggled into France in order to-”

  “We were talking about Anna,” I blurted before I could stop myself; there was a sharpness in my tone that surprised and unnerved me a little. “Sorry,” I added quickly, “I just —”

  “I’m sorry too,” Danforth interrupted, and he appeared to mean it genuinely; his discursive narrative was not a storyteller’s tactic designed to keep the hook in place but merely the tangled product of an aged mind. “It’s just that talking about Anna, it brought back how brave they were, the women of the war. They should build a memorial to them someday, Paul. A bronze sculpture in Washington or on Whitehall. Something quiet, but suggestive, to remind us of their sacrifice.” A look of utter heartbreak swam into his face. “It’s the lost we must remember, Paul. The ones who never had a chance to sit by the fire and lift their grandchildren into their laps and tell them the stories of their service.”

  “Of course,” I said sincerely.

  For a moment we seemed to reach another level in our understanding, not only of each other but of what was truly owed to those toward whom history had not been kind.

  “Anyway, about Anna,” Danforth continued, then stopped. He seemed at sea in his own tale. “Forgive me, Paul, but where was I?”

  “You said Clayton wanted you to find out more about her,” I reminded him.

  Danforth nodded. “Yes, that’s right. But without asking her questions directly. The idea was for me to insinuate myself into her life.” Suddenly a pained smile formed on his lips, and a faint sadness came into his eyes. “And so I became a spy.”

  “Did you find anything surprising about her?” I asked.

  “No,” Danforth said. “The surprise was about me.”

  ~ * ~

  Oak Bar, Plaza Hotel, New York City, 1939

  She arrived exactly on time, dressed in the business clothes she’d worn to the office. In a quick aside earlier that day, Danforth had conveyed to Anna what he called “Clayton’s latest instructions”— they should be seen together in more casual settings — along with the fact that Clayton had given no reason for this. That was typical of Clayton, Danforth had added with a small shrug designed to dismiss the importance of the meetings; it was part of Clayton’s “shadowy style.”

  Anna had nodded quickly in response, like a soldier under orders, then agreed to meet Danforth at the Plaza that evening.

  “Hello,” she said as she took a seat opposite Danforth. She glanced about but said nothing else, though it seemed to him that she had immediately absorbed various aspects of the room — the dark paneling, the lighted bar, the older man with his young mistress — that she had made careful note and would be able to recall these things, as a musician might remember the melody of a theme heard only once.

  “Would you like something to drink?” Danforth asked. “Perhaps a glass of wine?”

  “I’d rather have a cup of tea,” Anna said. She drew the scarf from her head, and in the way he’d noticed many times before, she seemed momentarily uncomfortable, as if even this modest disrobing was inappropriately seductive. She reminded him of the serving girls of Ireland who kept their eyes averted even as they placed or removed plates, as if doing otherwise would somehow compromise their chastity. How old it truly was, he thought, the Old World.

  He motioned the barmaid over to the table and ordered.

  They talked of nothing in particular. The wine and tea came. Danforth lifted his glass in a toast. “To your success,” he said.

  She smiled softly, touched his glass with her cup, then focused her attention on a young couple who’d taken a remote corner table, their hands locked together, their gaze intensely fixed on each other, everything else quite invisible to them.

  “They must be in love,” she said.

  The way she said it had an eerie inwardness to it that made Danforth recall the death of Henry Stanley, the great explorer. He’d lived near Big Ben at the end, and not long before his death, the great bell had sounded, a somber accounting that had awakened an inexpressible understanding in him. “How strange,” Stanley had murmured, “so that is time.”

  Danforth had no idea how to say any of this, however, and so he said, “I take it you’ve never been in love?”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said. “And you?”

  He thought of Cecilia, with whom he’d been out only the night before, how bright her smile was, the life that sparkled in her, the happiness she offered him, everything, everything but . . . what?

  “Yes,” he said, and put that but…what? aside.

  “It must be wonderful,” Anna said.

  “I’m sure you’ll know someday,” Danforth told her.

  She nodded crisply, as if cutting off an irrelevant discussion. “I’m leaving for Europe soon,” she told him.

  This news, coming to him by way of Anna herself, made her imminent departure more real, and Danforth felt the disquiet not only of her going but of the loss of some vital opportunity. It was as if he’d made a minimal offer on something small and precious but had lost it to a higher bidder.

  “Would you like to have dinner?” he asked, since there now seemed little else he could give her. “We could have it in the Palm Garden.”

  Anna considered this a moment. “No,” she said finally. “Let’s have it at my apartment. If you don’t mind leftovers.”

  “Your apartment?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to see where I live?”

  In anyone else, the question might have been fraught with romantic tension, but coming from Anna it seemed only a closer adherence to Clayton’s suggestion that they be together in more intimate settings.

  “All right,” Danforth said. “I’ll call for a taxi.”

  “No,” Anna said immediately. “Let’s take the bus.”

  And so they did, a long ride down Fifth Avenue, past Saks’ lighted windows filled with the clothes of the coming summer season, brightly colored bathing suits and leisurewear, the loose-fitting garb of the city’s moneyed class. The clothing would be bought and bundled up and taken out to the Hamptons or Fire Island or, farther still, Wellfleet or Martha’s Vineyard, the looming war in Europe causing the only change in this yearly migration, Paris and Rome abruptly no longer on the itinerary.

  Below Thirty-fourth Street, the avenue darkened as they entered a landscape of closed shops, small and unlighted, the purveyors of cheap clothes and costume jewelry already home with their families in Brooklyn, Queens, or the Bronx and whose absence drained some unmistakably vital energy from the city.

  The bus moved steadily southward, these same modest shops now giving way to a line of brick walkups and finally to the huddled streets of the Lower East Side.

  Night had fallen by then, but if there was safety in numbers, these streets were the safest in New York. For here, the people resided in close quarters, the spaciousness of the outer boroughs still unavailable to them. And so they lived stacked above tailor shops and bakeries and small groceries. Here, in the evening, they crowded the concrete stoops and spoke to one another in old-country tongues and dressed in clothes that seemed to be handed down not from older sibling to younger but from one generation to the next.

  Anna appeared as comfortable in the human current of these streets as a dolphin in the sea. Here all the world knew her and greeted her, and on the way to her apartment, she stopped many times to inquire if this child was still sick or that brother still in some far town.

  On each of these stops, she introduced Danforth as her employer, then went on to speak awhile before motioning him down the street. During these intervals, Danforth stood, alien and al
oof, waiting, sometimes impatiently, to move on and even slightly offended that Anna appeared either oblivious or indifferent to the odd position in which she had placed him.

  The entrance to her building was over a shop whose metal staircase was covered in signs with Hebrew lettering. The shop window was filled with a curious array of objects, none of which Danforth recognized, save for the peculiar candelabrum the Jews called a menorah and that he knew they lit only for some holiday. Fringed prayer shawls were displayed on shelves, along with what appeared to be matching cases, and these too had Hebrew lettering. There was also a small table covered with silver-plated and ceramic chalices of various sizes. The entire display struck Danforth as typical of the Ostjuden, whose superstitions his father had often derided and whose tradesmen he’d scornfully dismissed as peddlers.