Quest for Anna Klein, The (10 page)

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 kingdom 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.

“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, KruÅ¡evo.”

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 KruÅ¡evo 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.

“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 after 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 story teller'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.”

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.