The Quest for Anna Klein

by Thomas H. Cook

  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.

  “We’ll need to work out supply routes that are off the beaten track,” he said.

  And so for the next few minutes, they spoke of the original plan, a conversation during which Danforth realized that Anna had practically memorized the entire map of France: where each road led and through which villages, along with the routes of all the rivers, particularly the ones that emptied into the sea. It was as if she were plotting some enormous evacuation.

  After that, she seemed reluctant to speak at all, her silences so long and grave Danforth later wondered if she had already embarked on a far different project, one whose dark route and fatal end she had decided long ago.

  “So,” Danforth said jokingly, by way of testing those waters, “maybe we will change the world.”

  Anna shook her head. “No,” she said. “We are just little spies.”

  ~ * ~

  Century Club, New York City, 2001

  Little spies.

  There would be times in the future, Danforth said, when he would ask himself if this remark had moved Anna deeper into a plot she’d already begun to contemplate, or if it was from that grim conclusion that the plot had taken wing. Or perhaps the grave conspiracy that had sealed his fate had never been anything but a shadow plot whose goal had been to keep him utterly in the dark.

  “Little spies,” Danforth repeated now, in a way that suggested he had many times turned this same sentence over in his mind. “We’re guided through life by a mirror ball,” he said. “With only little flashes to light our way.” He suddenly appeared captured by a distant terror, and he said, “The world was on fire, Paul. And Anna seemed to feel that we were doing nothing to put it out. She didn’t say it outright, but I could see it building in her mind.” He was silent for a time, then he said, “Bannion believed that her mind worked like a mosaic: shards of this or that, illuminated here or there, but at last forming a brilliant pattern. He believed that to the very end.”

  “The end of what?”

  “His life,” Danforth answered casually. “By then he had nothing but contempt for me.”

  “Contempt? Why?”

  Danforth smiled softly. “Because he thought I was a lovesick fool.” He drew in a long, troubled breath. “And it was true, Paul,” he said. “I had quite proven that by then.” He laughed gently at what he now seemed to regard as a sad fantasy. “I remember how Bannion once shook his head and looked at me as if I’d never be able to understand real commitment. ‘With you,’ he said, ‘it was always her.’ Which was true, and which I became aware of after Christophe.”

  “After Christophe?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Danforth said. “Because quite by accident he came back into the story. Not with any fanfare, but like fifth business in an opera. The little thing that moves a big thing, and sets even bigger things into motion. With Christophe, it was just a chance meeting in Paris, but it changed everything.”

  ~ * ~

  Paris, France, 1939

  “Bonjour, Thomas.”

  Danforth turned and saw Christophe, typically bedraggled, moving toward him holding a package covered in brown paper and tied with string.

  “I spend a lot of time in the park now,” he said. “It’s big enough to hide in.”

  “Why are you hiding?” Danforth asked.

  “I am the new Marat,” Christophe said with a self-deprecating laugh.

  For a mome
nt his eyes softened, and something in them revealed the little boy he had once been, no doubt the most restless and idiosyncratic in his class, doomed by his own nervous energy and incapacity to conform, so that he now seemed as pitiable as Marat must have, a denizen of the city’s sewers.

  He indicated the ragged package beneath his arm. “It’s my book,” he said. “It’s about my time in Spain.”

  He suddenly became surprisingly talkative, relating tales of combat (a bullet in the thigh in Madrid, shattered ribs when a caisson had rolled over him during the retreat toward the Pyrenees). As he continued, Danforth found himself liking the man more and more, for he was one of those people who could narrate stories of his own self-sacrifice and personal courage in a manner that was comically self-mocking. The bullet in the leg had been his own fault for trying to piss out of view of a young nun. The caisson had rolled over him because he’d dropped his ration of bread, bent down to retrieve it, been butted in the ass by an irritated burro, and from there had slid down a pebbly slope and into the path (talk about bad timing!) of the rolling caisson. He was essentially destitute, and his faith in Communism was all but childlike, but he was also generous and funny, and to these qualities he had added courage and commitment and a willingness to sacrifice his life for the great ideal of unifying mankind beneath the fluttering banner of the International Brigades.

  “Would you like to read my book?” Christophe asked.

  Danforth saw that Christophe thought him a man of taste and perhaps even some influence in literary circles. To decline to read his book would obviously dishearten him, and Danforth could find no way to refuse the request.

  “Of course,” he said.

  Christophe handed over the manuscript. “You must tell me your true opinion.”

  After that they talked of nothing in particular, each careful not to mention the trip to Gurs, the Spaniards interned there, any hint of the Project.

  They parted a few minutes later, and Danforth would always remember the slump of Christophe’s shoulders as he walked away, how they had seemed barely to support the frayed little coat he wore.

  Once back in his room, Danforth sat down and began to read Christophe’s manuscript. The French he found there was barely grammatical, imbued with faults and misspellings that betrayed the rudimentary nature of the author’s education.

  As he continued to read, Danforth came to feel Christophe’s many deprivations, how much he had been shaped by want and inflamed by the prospect of relieving it. There was a starry-eyed quality to his social analysis that imagined opera houses in the vineyards and concerts in the mines. Christophe believed in Man as religious people believed in God, every word directed toward the achievement of what he called, with awkward if typical hyperbole, “a human heaven where the unshod walk in the clouds and from that height don’t look down on others.”

  It was early evening before Danforth finished the book, and in need of a walk after so long a session, he decided to return it to its author. During the walk, he thought not at all of the odd conversation he’d earlier had with Christophe, his talk of being the new Marat and that he was in hiding; in the coming years, Danforth would find himself amazed at his utter failure to recognize the signs of peril. On that day, as he would many times recall, he’d felt not a twinge of alarm as he entered the dark corridor that led to Christophe’s garret, nor was he concerned by the fact that when he reached it, the door was slightly ajar. After knocking softly and calling out Christophe’s name, he had, quite without dread, stepped inside.

  The room was dimly lighted, and the curtains were tightly drawn, but as he moved farther into the room Danforth saw the unmade bed, single chair, and desk scattered with papers. Christophe had placed a few family photographs on the nearby mantel, pictures that revealed the humble nature of his origins as well as a view of the Normandy landscape in which he had grown up. There was a stack of newspapers by his desk, and a bookshelf that bore exactly what Danforth would have expected: French translations of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and a collection of Stalin’s speeches.

  From where he stood, near the center of the room, Danforth could see into the tiny bathroom. A plain green curtain hung from a metal bar over the bathtub.

  It was then he saw it, a streak of blood that ran down the side of the tub and pooled at its base, a sight that both chilled and captivated him, making him move toward it in exactly the way of a man in a movie melodrama, slowly but steadily, as if in response to music in the background.

  ~ * ~

  Century Club, New York City, 2001

  “Like a spy-picture soundtrack,” Danforth said. “Very moody. Not that Greek tinkle you hear in The Third Man. But very dark and moody. A sustained C, maybe an augmented chord . . .”

  “Wait!” I blurted.

  Danforth looked at me, perplexed by my sudden outburst.

  “What happened to Christophe?” I demanded.

  “He’d been murdered,” Danforth answered. “A bullet in his head. I later tracked down the weapon. It was German, a nine-millimeter Mauser. Years later, I found out that Christophe had been in contact with something called the Red Orchestra, a group of Communist students based in Berlin, and that he’d made frequent trips to Copenhagen, where he’d also established contacts. All his contacts were young, and almost all of them were dead by the end of the war.”

  The details Danforth had gathered on such a minor figure in his story surprised me. It also generated a question.

  “Did you track down the fate of everyone you were involved with?”

  “Yes,” Danforth answered. “Because I needed to find out what had actually happened, you see. I needed to find out what Anna had done. But more, I needed to find out why she had done it. Because Bannion was right in what he said to me. It was always her.”

  A wave of barely suppressed emotion swept over him; he fought it in a way that had by then become familiar, a quick retreat into an academic tone.

  “Have you ever been to Orléans, Paul?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “It’s quite a lovely city to the southwest of Paris,” Danforth said. “Anna and I went there after Christophe’s murder. We were, I suppose, on the run. We knew we had to get out of Paris, but we had no idea where we should go, so we went to Orléans. The idea was to keep on the move. I thought it would be good practice once the war broke out.” He smiled. “But as it turned out, Orléans was our last stop in France.”

  ~ * ~

  Orléans, France, 1939

  She crossed the street that day at the height of noon, and Danforth would forever after recall that in that bright summer sun, with the grand facade of the old train station behind her, she had seemed the most improbable of spies. She had none of the studied exoticism of Mata Hari, nothing flamboyant or bejeweled. She looked like someone’s daughter or someone’s sister or someone’s wife. The trappings of the courtesan would have embarrassed her, and Danforth could not imagine her the mistress of some powerful military or government official, gathering secrets revealed during boudoir encounters, passing them on in packets sealed with red wax.

  And yet, at that galvanizing moment, Danforth found himself drawn to her as he had never been drawn to any woman before or would be after; through all the passing years, he would hear the click of her heels upon the cobblestones of Orléans and see her eyes searching for him among the assembling throng; he’d remember her sudden, sweet look of recognition when she saw him, followed by her pulling back from whatever regard for him, romantic or otherwise, she’d so briefly revealed.

  “Is he still planning to be here?” she asked in French.

  She meant Deloncle, who was scheduled to appear at a rally in this, his hometown.

  “Yes,” Danforth told her. “At Place du Martroi.”

  Place du Martroi was a large square, the town’s central meeting place. The Hotel de Ville rested at its far end, with the rest of the square bordered by the stately, powder-white facades common to government buildings. Ninety years before,
an equestrian statue of Joan of Arc had been commissioned by the town. It showed the Maid of Orléans in full military garb. Anna paused to look at it. She did not appear to identify with Joan or think herself a force in history, and yet something in the way she stopped and gazed on the statue would return to Danforth many times, Anna not as a vision of the female warrior on the march but as a woman contemplating with a certain sympathy the visionary madness of a deluded girl.

  The assembly was large but by no means filled the square. Deloncle was a fierce extremist, after all, not a figure of widespread adoration, as de Gaulle would later become. And as Danforth noted a few minutes later, even Prime Minister Daladier, for all his barrel-chested squatness, gave off a considerably more commanding physical presence than the man who now mounted a small platform to address the crowd.