Quest for Anna Klein, The (6 page)

“Where did you learn German?” Danforth asked her when he returned to English.

“I pick up languages very easily,” Anna answered without elaboration.

“And you speak French too?” Danforth asked.

“Yes,” Anna said.
“Voulez-vous parler en Français?”

Danforth nodded and they switched to French, and after that to Spanish, and after that to Italian, and in all three cases Anna spoke with a fluency that astonished him.

“How many languages do you speak?” he asked in English.

“Nine,” Anna answered but did not list them.

“You live in the city?”

She nodded crisply. “The Lower East Side.”

Danforth's father had called her neighborhood “the squalid kingdom of the Jews,” and as she lowered her eyes, Danforth considered the long history of her people's persecutions: the false accusations made against them — that they poisoned wells and sacrificed Gentile children — the hundreds of sacked and burning villages they'd fled, the wintry forests in which they'd hidden, boiling tree bark for their soup.

The barmaid arrived. Danforth ordered a scotch, but Anna merely waved her hand. “Thank you, nothing for me,” she said.

“Not a drinker?” Danforth asked.

“No,” she said.

“I admire your discipline,” Danforth said, meaning it half as a joke. He shrugged. “I suppose you know that I've been asked to provide a place where you can be trained.”

One of her tiny brown hands inched over and covered the other. “Yes,” she answered, then suddenly leaned forward. “Why did you want to meet me?” she asked quite determinedly and in a way that radically shifted what had seemed a secure balance of power: Danforth was now the one being evaluated, she the one with favors to grant.

“To satisfy myself, I suppose,” he answered. “I wanted to make sure you were a serious person.”

“And are you satisfied that I am?” she asked.

Her frankness surprised him, as did her impatience to get on with whatever task lay before her.

“Yes,” Danforth answered quickly, though it was not until that moment that he realized he was. “I'm not being asked to do very much, after all.”

“So we'll use your place for the training?” Anna asked.

Danforth nodded.

She rose and began to gather her things, her movements quick but precise, not at all like the antic twitches of the character she'd played when he'd first seen her at the Old Town Bar.

“I thought we might have dinner,” Danforth said.

She shook her head. “I have work.”

With that she reached for her coat, drew out an envelope, and offered it to Danforth. “I'm to give you this. It's from Clayton.”

Danforth took the envelope from her, and as he took it, he noted how small her hand was, how nearly doll-like and delicate, the slenderness of her bones. “Do you know what's in here?” he asked.

She nodded as she put on her coat. “The next step,” she said.

Here Danforth paused and drew in a slow breath.

“There are symbolic gestures, Paul,” he said. “They may be small, like taking that envelope from Anna's hand, but they have the force of moral commitment.”

“Like that line Travis drew in the dust at the Alamo,” I said.

“There's no actual proof that that ever happened,” Danforth said. “But it doesn't matter. And yes, my taking that envelope from Anna's hand was like that, a gesture that states quite clearly that from this moment on, there will be no turning back.” He
paused again, then added, “With that simple gesture I committed myself to the Project. Not just to the rather unspectacular thing I'd been asked to do for it, provide a house in the country, but to the Project as a whole. It turned out to be a good thing, since Clayton was already asking me to take another step — to provide a cover identity for Anna — which I did after I read the note inside the envelope.” He took a sip from his drink. “And so the next day, following the instructions in that note, I put an ad for a special assistant in the classified section of the
New York Times.
The applicant's only requirement was that he or she had to be available for extended service abroad and be familiar with several languages.” He smiled softly but warily; he briefly appeared to me like a child being led into a dark wood.

“Then I waited,” he said.

Over the next few days, applicants for the special-assistant position came and went, mostly young men with sparkling credentials, some of whom were quick to mention their distinguished families and the prestigious schools they had attended. Fraternities were brought up, as were summers in the Hamptons or on Cape Cod. It was clear to Danforth that some of the applicants viewed importation as an attractive career choice, perhaps even, oddly enough, a step toward acquiring a position in the State Department. Several of these young men had traveled extensively, and all spoke at least one foreign language, though their proficiencies varied widely. Most were eager to be employed, though Danforth knew that very few of them would go hungry as a result of being out of work.

But a few less well-heeled applicants also showed up, always in suits they'd bought off the rack. These were first-generation
men who had no claim to any distinctions they had not won by their own efforts. Danforth admired them in a way he could not admire the others or himself, and he would have hired them to fill other positions if any had been available. He liked the cut of them, their modest style, even the slightly beleaguered quality they tried to hide.

There were no female applicants until Anna showed up a few days after the ad appeared, a delay Danforth thought ordered by Clayton and for which no explanation was requested or given.

She wore a surprisingly professional ensemble: tweed suit, white blouse, a single gold chain at her neck, and a pair of matching earrings.

“Miss . . . Klein?” Danforth asked when he looked up from her perfectly typed resumé.

Her smile was quite bright, as were her eyes. “Yes,” she said. She thrust out her hand energetically. “Pleased to meet you, sir.”

The transformation was stunning. There was no hint of either the frenetic female who'd snatched at her things in the Old Town Bar or the curiously aggressive young woman who'd slid into his booth at the Dugout Bar four days earlier.

She was more than an actress, Danforth thought; she was a chameleon.

For the next few minutes, they did the dance of prospective employer and prospective employee. Danforth asked the usual questions, and Anna gave the expected answers. He showed no hint that he'd ever met her, and neither did she. He maintained a strict professional air, and she an eager one, as if anxious to be offered the job.

Cautiously, as they neared the end of the interview, he asked a question he would have considered vital even if he'd had no knowledge of the woman before him.

“Do you have a passport?” he asked.

“No.”

“You'll need to get one.” His smile was coolly professional, as he thought it should be. “If you get the job, of course.” He glanced at her resumé. “I suppose that will be all for now.”

With that, she left the offi ce, but something of her lingered through the day, an awareness of her that surprised Danforth as he went about the usual business routines. From time to time, he looked up from his desk at the chair she'd sat in during their brief meeting, and strangely, its emptiness created a hunger to see her again. It was a feeling he found curiously new and faintly alarming, like the first sensation of a narcotic one knew one must henceforth avoid.

At six he packed his briefcase with the evening's work and stepped out of his offi ce.

Mrs. O'Rourke, his secretary, was sitting at her desk. She handed Danforth a small envelope. “This came by messenger.”

Once in the elevator, Danforth opened the envelope and read the note:
Six o'clock. Sit near the fountain at Washington Square.

He'd thought he might find Anna seated on a bench near the fountain, but she was nowhere to be seen, and so he took a seat and waited. For a time, he simply watched various Village types as they strolled beneath the bare trees: professors and students with briefcases and books, a bearded artist lugging paints and easel, two workmen precariously balancing a large piece of glass.

The man who finally approached him was short and compactly built, a little steel ball of a fellow. Danforth had noticed that he'd cruised twice around the fountain, then broken from that orbit and drifted along the far edge of the park, and then around it, until at last he'd seemed satisfied of something. That Danforth was the man he'd been sent to meet? That he wasn't being followed? Danforth had no idea. He knew only that as if in response to a radio signal, the man had suddenly swung back into the park, walked over, and sat down.

“My name is LaRoche,” he said, then laughed. “Clayton thought I might scare you off, so I have to be nice so you will not be afraid of me.”

Danforth had no idea if this was true, but he suspected that it might be and felt himself challenged by Clayton's evaluation of him.

“You don't look very scary,” he said, though Danforth did find something frightening in this man, an edginess that made Dan-forth slightly unsettled in his presence.

“Not scary at all,” LaRoche said. “Just a round little man.”

He wore a faded derby, and his body was loosely wrapped in a brown trench coat, his hands sunk deep in its pockets. Despite the French name, he was, Danforth gathered from the accent, anything but French.

“I am to teach the woman the skills she needs,” he added.

Skills
was
skeels
and the
w
in
woman
had not been pronounced with a German
v,
linguistic characteristics that made it diffi cult for Danforth to pinpoint LaRoche's accent.

“Clayton says she is small,” LaRoche said. He followed a lone bicyclist's turn around the fountain. The cyclist made a second circle, and that seemed to add an uneasiness to LaRoche's manner. “Your house is far away,” he said.

“Yes,” Danforth said. “And very secluded.”

LaRoche nodded crisply, then looked out over the park, his attention moving from a woman pushing a carriage to an old man hobbling slowly on a cane. His expression remained the same as his gaze drifted from one to the other. It was wariness and suspicion, as if both the woman and the old man might not be what they appeared to be. “This weekend,” he said.

Danforth nodded.

LaRoche glanced toward the far corner of the park, where a man leaned against a lamppost, reading a newspaper. “I should go now,” he said.

With that, he was gone, and for a time Danforth was left to wonder just what sort of man this LaRoche was. His accent had been impossible to determine, which could only mean that he'd never lingered long enough in one place to sink ineradicable linguistic roots. There had been a nomadic quality in his demeanor as well, rootlessness in his twitching eyes and in the way he was constantly alert to every movement around him. Had Danforth known then the dark things he learned later on, he would have seen that LaRoche suffered from a paranoia of the soul, the same fear that would later be experienced by the huddled masses that were crowded into railway cars and the creaking bellies of transport ships and whose cries he would hear in many as-yet-unknown dialects.

Dark things he learned later? Paranoia of the soul? Huddled masses? The creaking bellies of transport ships?

I couldn't help but wonder where Danforth's tale was headed.

“Clearly, your story doesn't end in New York,” I said.

Danforth shook his head. “No, not New York,” he said. “We have decades to go, Paul, continents to traverse. Lots of sweep for a little parable.”

“A parable?” I asked.

Danforth shrugged. “Nothing more.”

Now my journey here truly seemed a waste of time.

Danforth saw the impatience that seized me and quickly acted to relieve it. “Tell me a little about yourself, Paul.”

“Well, my father was a professor, as you know,” I answered.

“And your mother?” Danforth asked.

“A professor's wife,” I said. “A listener. We had faculty dinner parties, the academics always holding forth. My mother hardly
ever spoke on those occasions. I think she felt inadequate.” In my mind, I saw the car swerve on the ice, tumble into the ditch. “My parents were killed in a car accident.”

“I'm sorry to hear it. And your grandparents?”

“They're gone too,” I answered. “The last of them, my grandfather on my mother's side, died just last year.”

Danforth's demeanor abruptly changed. “Life can be very treacherous, can't it?”

I assumed that he was speaking of the accident that had killed my parents, though I could sense a more obscure undertone; it seemed as if I were gazing at a painting that revealed one thing on the canvas but hid something darker beneath it.

“Yes, it can,” I agreed.

I saw the shadow of one of those dark things pass over him.

“A young man adopts a terrible ideology, and after that, there is nothing but destruction,” he said.

I wondered if he was now speaking of the young men in the planes, and for the first time I allowed myself the dim hope that his story — his parable — might offer something of value in regard to my assignment. If so, I hoped to reach it speedily.

“So, you agreed to provide a place for Anna's training,” I said coaxingly.

Danforth nodded slowly. “A place for her training, yes.”

LaRoche's car was a rattling old Ford, dusty and with a badly sloping running board on the driver's side, the conveyance of a tradesman, exactly the sort of car no one would notice. For a moment Danforth wondered if it too was part of the plan, a tiny screw in the mechanism that was apparently much more meticulously assembled than he'd thought at first.