Quest for Anna Klein, The (18 page)

This was not an illusion he could long sustain, however, and by the time he returned to his apartment, his fantasy of a sweeping pan-European resistance had died a dog's death, and dawn found him by the window, peering out over the boulevard, wondering if he and Anna could still carry out their mission if Clayton's “urgent business matters” proved more perilous than he'd supposed, or if Clayton himself — the unsettling possibility suddenly struck him — was something other than he seemed.

“Other than he seemed?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Clayton other than he seemed,” I repeated, now no less unsettled than Danforth had been so many years before. “So that cable
had
made you suspect that he might be a traitor?”

“That night, as I was standing at the window, yes, that thought did occur to me,” Danforth answered. “But not because of anything I actually knew about Clayton. It was more general than that, and it was very vague. Later, I would come to believe that life itself — when you look it in the eye — is a treacherous thing. It isn't out to break our hearts, as the Irish say. It's out to leave us baffl ed and confused, to strip us of any faith we might have in anyone, even ourselves. That's what life really is, Paul, a wearing down of trust.”

For the first time, Danforth appeared profoundly weathered, a landscape raked by wind and rain, part of him deeply furrowed, part of him smoothed and softened.

“It can make a man murderous,” he added. “It can make a man reach for a pistol on a warm tropical day.”

Then I saw it for the second time, the quiet capacity Danforth had for violence, how steady it would be, how carefully calculated and reasonably carried out, the way he would kill.

Some hint of this insight surely appeared in my gaze at that moment, because Danforth reacted to it in a way I'd not seen before. Retreat. It seemed to me he had gotten ahead of himself and knew it, and now he forced himself to step back and back and back, until we arrived in London.

“They once flooded the lobby, you know,” Clayton said in what struck Danforth as a strained effort at his old gaiety. “They filled it with water, and the patrons floated in little gondolas.” He shook his head. “It's hard to imagine now,” he added. “Such . . . frivolity.”

Danforth found Clayton's uncharacteristic solemnity worrisome. It was clearly a sign that certain things weren't going well, though in what way they weren't going well remained obscure. One thing was obvious, however. Clayton was no longer enjoying his role as lead conspirator; as he sat in suit and tie, dressed as perfectly as ever, he seemed like a portrait darkening at the edges.

“Thank you both for coming,” Clayton began somberly. “This is not something I could say in a cable or letter that might be opened by some curious offi cial.” He appeared quite grave. “It has to do with a report I received not long ago. I want you to know about it in order to calm any doubts you might have.” He looked at Anna. “Or any suspicions.” He took a deep sip from his glass and then began.

“Bannion has a contact in Germany,” he said. “His code name is Rache, and he's been very good at supplying us with highly reliable information. The latest is that some very wealthy Brits have been regularly making payments to informants in Poland because they expect that country to be invaded. Rache doesn't know who these Brits are or how many of these informants are on their payroll. He knows only that once the invasion takes place, these informants are supposed to make reports to their backers.” He paused as if truly pained by what he was about
to say. “But it's all a twisted conspiracy, because, according to Rache, these same wealthy men have been turning over the names and addresses of their paid informants to the SS.”

Danforth was a novice in matters of international plots and counterplots, and if Clayton had asked him his opinion at that moment, he would have had to admit that he had not a clue as to the meaning or implication of what he'd just heard.

“Why would they do that?” Anna asked.

“Because these British backers are actually pro-German,” Clayton answered. “They are only pretending to be otherwise.”

Danforth looked at him quizzically.

“The real enemy of these men is the Soviets,” Clayton said. “For that reason, they want the eastern German invasion of Poland to be smooth and fast. The idea is that after the invasion, the Brits will hand over the names of these informants, who'll be rounded up very quickly, then shot. This will happen immediately, and in a very public way, right in front of neighbors and coworkers. Scores will be killed, but hundreds will be witnesses to their executions. This, the Brits think, will send a shiver through the population and put a stop to any early resistance.”

It seemed a wildly far-fetched scheme, but all Danforth said was “Does this Rache have any proof?”

Clayton shook his head. “No, and Bannion suspects the whole thing is just the usual Communist paranoia.”

“Rache is a Communist?” Danforth asked.

Clayton nodded. “In the underground, yes. Still loyal to his cause, according to Bannion, which is why Bannion doesn't take this plot seriously.” He looked at me. “But he insisted that I warn you and Anna anyway.” His smile was anything but cheery. “And so I have.”

“What do you think of this report, Robert?” Danforth asked.

“That it's probably absurd,” Clayton answered. “Or at least exaggerated. Bannion doubts that it would even work. If the Germans
carried out these executions, it's possible that instead of squelching resistance, they would actually intensify it.”

“Then why tell us about it at all?” Anna asked, a question Danforth would consider many times over the coming years, sometimes convinced of its sincerity, other times equally convinced that she had always known the larger plot and her question was meant only to conceal that fact.

“Well, suppose you heard about it later,” Clayton answered. “Wouldn't you wonder if a similar game was being played on you and Tom? Of course you would. So Bannion and I thought you should be informed.” He looked from Anna to Tom. “If either of you has any doubts about the Project, then now's the time to pull out.”

Anna leaned forward slightly. “How much does Rache know about us?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Clayton assured her. “He's focused entirely on Germany, on resistance to the Nazis in the homeland.” His smile was weak, but pointed. “And he may be quite paranoid at the moment. An underground Communist in Germany? Who wouldn't be paranoid?”

There was an odd, suspended moment during which no one spoke, and it later seemed to Danforth that it was here that each of them had fully committed him- or herself to whatever lay ahead. It was as if they had been driving down a smooth road and had hit a bump; it might have diverted them, but it hadn't. In a subtle but potentially corrosive way, the challenge had tested their confidence in each other but had not shaken it.

“So,” Clayton said after a moment, apparently reassured that the Project was not in danger, “tell me about Gurs.”

They told him what they'd found there and that they planned to visit other camps. They would make a quick assessment, then begin the process of contacting and organizing this army of the dispossessed.

Their report was quite thorough, Danforth thought, but as they gave it, it seemed to him that Anna was unsettled, like water slowly beginning to simmer. In the early days of her training, she had viewed the prospect of living undercover, perhaps for a very extended period, as an integral part of the Project. But since Gurs, she'd seemed uneasy and perhaps even anxious; Danforth felt she was now running on a different, and more rapid, timetable than he or Clayton, and this he found disturbing. Surely at this point, the Project required patience.

“All right,” Clayton said at the end of their briefing. “So we will move forward according to plan.” He took a long draw on the cigarette, then snapped up the menu with what struck Danforth as his old, youthful energy. “For your information, my dear friends, the Savoy is said to have the best steak Diane in London.”

There was no more talk of spies and conspiracies, of hundreds who might be sacrificed in the east, and anyone watching the three of them for the remainder of that evening would have seen nothing beyond friends enjoying themselves. Clayton spoke of his new job in London; he was working at the British Museum, a post he had gotten on his own merit, he said, rather than through his family's name or money, a feat of which he seemed quite proud. He had always had it easy, he said, and so had yearned for what he called “some hard slogging” through which he might prove himself.

During it all, Anna seemed guarded. She watched Clayton as if she were unsure he was the man he seemed to be, and the attitude caused Danforth to wonder if his earlier sense that everyone's trust had been renewed had been premature.

It was a look that urged Danforth to feel the same, and so after Anna went up to her room, he suggested that he and Clayton have drinks at the bar. Clayton immediately agreed, and for the next two hours Danforth tried to get Clayton drunk without getting drunk himself. Clayton had ultimately noticed that Danforth
wasn't holding up his end, however, and he had stopped drinking.

Was that suspicious? Danforth asked himself. Was it suspicious, or was Clayton just a man who didn't want to get sloshed while his friend was quite obviously staying sober?

Danforth didn't know, and thought he would never know, and so at around midnight he returned to his room, slept the sleep of wolves, and the next morning had breakfast in the stately hotel dining room and then took a stroll around London that took him to Trafalgar Square, then across it and down Whitehall all the way to Parliament, a route he would take many times in the years to come, always with an eye to encountering something that might shed light on the mystery that both illuminated and darkened the middle years of his life, a time when, as he later reminded himself, he might have been making money and establishing a family, as Clayton had.

Back at the hotel around noon, he went directly to Anna's room.

She opened the door to him; she'd just showered, and her body was wrapped in a loose-fitting robe, her hair in a towel.

“Tom, come in.”

She padded barefoot across the floor to the bathroom, and Danforth suddenly imagined her dangling those same feet off the side of an iron bed at Ellis Island, and with that thought, he felt something tragic at the heart of things, that life was dark and entangling, everyone struggling helplessly in its invisible web.

“When are we going back to Paris?” Anna called from behind her bathroom door.

“Whenever you want,” Danforth answered.

“Tomorrow then,” Anna said.

A moment passed before the door opened and she came out, dressed in a white blouse and long black skirt, into the tiny living room.

“You look . . . beautiful,” he said.

She glanced away, almost shyly, as if this were a remark to which she could find no way to respond. “Did you have lunch?”

“No,” Danforth said. “Shall we go down?”

She shook her head. “No, let's eat here.”

With that she retrieved a bag from a nearby table.

“There was a little market,” she said. “I bought some things.”

They were modest, the items she'd purchased: a loaf of bread, some local cheese, a few squares of chocolate whose sweetness he would — along with a thousand other sensations ineffably joined with her — all his life remember.

While he ate he spoke of his long walk through London, the bookstalls of Charing Cross, the whirling traffic of Trafalgar. She had clearly made no effort to see the city, and he wondered why this was, and even suggested that they remain a day or two in London before returning to France.

“No,” she said, “I'll go back tomorrow.”

She clearly meant that she would do this with or without Danforth, and because of that, he felt himself at a remove from any possibility of her affection; he was a man who had a specific purpose and who was, beyond that purpose, expendable.

“Then we'll leave for Dover tomorrow,” he said.

Which they did, then crossed the Channel on a peaceful sea. On the crossing, Danforth thought of the Spanish armada, and spoke of it to Anna, how the grand ambitions of a Spanish king had sunk beneath these very waves. From this observation, he had gone on to wonder if Germany might one day hazard such a crossing and perhaps, luckily for the British, meet the same fate.

She had listened to all of this attentively, and he finally decided that she did not consider him pedantic, as Cecilia probably had, though she'd made a valiant effort to conceal it.

Still he said, “I'm going on. You should stop me.”

“I would if I wanted to,” she told him, then asked if he'd ever heard of the Divine Wind.

He hadn't, and so she told him that an earlier armada, this one launched by Kublai Khan, had attempted the conquest of Japan. A storm, not unlike the one that had sunk the ships of King Philip, had spelled doom for this armada too, a divine intervention the Japanese had immortalized and yearly celebrated as a Divine Wind.

“My mother told me that story,” Anna said when she finished it.

This mention clearly summoned emotions she did not want, so she looked away, out toward the far shores of France, a retreat he had seen before and that, rather than putting him off, inexplicably drew him to her.

“After dinner, I had drinks with Clayton,” he told her at one point. “I didn't see anything that told me if Clayton was playing some game. I wish I'd found some sign to read. But if one was there, I couldn't read it.”

Neither spoke for a time, and during that interval Danforth worked to reassess the situation in which he found himself: heading back to France with Anna, but with no clear activity in mind save at some point secreting supplies for an army of interned Spaniards. Anna now seemed to have waning interest in the mission, so he felt compelled to reawaken it.