Quest for Anna Klein, The

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Do you think this is all rather extreme,” Anna asked, “this hiding me away?”

  “I don’t know,” Danforth admitted. “But you are . . .” He stopped because he felt a vulnerability he didn’t want her to see.

  “What?”

  “Valuable,” Danforth said, “to the Project.” He shrugged. “Whatever the Project is.”

  She began to empty the bags. “How did you explain my leaving work?”

  “A sick relative,” Danforth answered. “No one questioned it. Why would they? It’s a common story.” He drew in a quick breath. “Anyway, I’ve brought you two weeks’ worth of provisions.”

  “Would you like something to drink?” she asked.

  “Coffee,” he said. “If you have it.”

  “I have it.”

  She sent him to the front room, made the coffee, then joined him. By then, he was sitting in the chair by the window. In the distance, he could see the private school he’d attended as a child, all the boys in suits.

  “You have a nice view of the children of the privileged class.” He took a sip from his cup. “You’d probably find their parents rather shallow.”

  “No,” Anna said. “Just lucky.”

  He wanted to tell her that the privileged were perhaps less lucky than she imagined, that for all their many advantages, they were blocked from certain of life’s core experiences. They could know great grief certainly, and great loss. They could fall victim to a thousand random horrors. But there was a desperate hunger they could not know: the shaping rigor of actual need. He was not at all sure she would understand this, however, and so what came from him was a simple “I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to leave without telling you that. I’m truly sorry.”

  “Sorry about what?” Anna asked.

  “That business about your being Spanish,” Danforth explained. “You must have found that very insulting.”

  She shrugged.

  “It would never affect what I feel about you personally,” Danforth said cautiously. “The respect I have for you, for what you’re doing.” He shook his head at the terrible inadequacy of what he was saying, how it seemed he was only digging a deeper grave for himself. “This must all sound so hollow to you.” He placed his cup firmly on the table beside him. “I respect you, that’s what I mean. I truly respect you, and I respect what you’re doing.”

  She went back to the kitchen and continued to empty the bags. “You won’t have to come again,” she told him. “I’m leaving for France in a few days.”

  “France?” he said, following her into the kitchen.

  “Yes.”

  “Alone?”

  “Of course.”

  She continued to busy herself with the bags, but Danforth saw a quick succession of emotions flash in her eyes: first dread, then the immediate suppression of it. In that moment, she seemed carved from will alone. He could not imagine her as a child, or even as a teenager, and he sensed that during her youth, she had been aged by a hardship she had yet to reveal, aged so deeply and thoroughly that her soul was now like one of those ancient coins his father imported, so scuffed and striated no polish could ever make them shine. If she ever kissed a man, he thought, it would be beneath the Bridge of Sighs.

  “Well, I should be on my way,” he said, and walked to the door.

  “Goodbye,” she said, without offering her hand.

  He lingered in a way that he thought must surely seem unaccountable to her, as if he were waiting for something to be returned.

  “And thanks again,” she added. “For everything.”

  Outside, Danforth stood for a moment in front of her building, glancing up and down the street, before turning westward, heading aimlessly toward Columbia. At Columbia Walk, he sat down on the stairs and peered out at the university library, the names of the great inscribed across its wide façade, Homer, Sophocles, Plato, and the like. First at Trinity and later at Princeton, he had studied them all, but it struck him that they were of little use to him now, that the choices he would make during the next stage of his life would be determined without reference to his education or what his travels had taught him or even anything he’d heard in any of the languages he spoke.

  Danforth suddenly thought of the cold glint in the eye of the warlord commander of those Balkan thugs, how he must have had the same look when he’d ordered the crucifixion of that hapless man, how he must have felt nothing as he’d watched him hang there, stripped to the waist, his arms and legs and feet streaked with blood. The passengers had been herded back into the train once the thieves had stolen whatever they could find. As if boarding a train at Victoria Station, he and his father had calmly reclaimed their seats, then felt the train lurch forward. He could still remember the wave of relief that had swept over him at that instant, but now he recalled something else more vividly: that in the midst of that relief, with the train inching forward, he’d glanced out the window and actually admired the beauty of the countryside until the crucified man came once again into view. Danforth had assumed him dead, but as the train dragged past, the man had lifted his head and stared Danforth directly in the eyes.

  Nothing as heartrending had happened to him since, and as he sat on the stairs at Columbia, the memory of it lingered in his mind until he noticed a tall young woman with long blond hair. She was moving swiftly across Columbia Walk, her books clutched to her breast. She would graduate and marry and raise her children in a large house, Danforth knew. She would fill her middle years with works of civic charity, and in later life be many times honored with plaques and citations. In old age, she would sit in a white gazebo and oversee her gardens, minding that the irises be thinned out in the fall and that the fountain, modeled on one she’d admired in Ravello, be each week cleaned and polished.

  Suddenly Danforth felt a terrible hollowness; it did not fall away as he’d expected it to but grew as the days passed, and by the weekend he seemed to be disappearing into a vast emptiness that felt, truly, like death.

  Century Club, New York City, 2001

  “Regret becomes self-accusation in the end,” Danforth told me. “And the deepest accusation of them all is that you settled for an inadequate life.”

  “And for you, what would that inadequate life have been?” I asked.

  “It would have been to be that blond girl’s husband,” Danforth answered flatly. “When you get right down to it, that was my terror. The lights were going out all over Europe, but my chief concern was that I not end up like one of those people Fitzgerald wrote about, sitting in their clubs, setting down their drinks, dreaming their old best dreams.”

  He had circled back to his first reference, a narrative trick I couldn’t help admiring.

  “What did you think I was going to say, Paul?” he asked. “What did you think I was going to tell you about my motivation at that moment?”

  “Oh, perhaps that you needed to prove that you weren’t an anti-Semite like your father,” I answered.

  “Oedipal loathing,” Danforth said. “That’s fueled a few tales, no doubt about it. But not this one, Paul.” He shook his head. “No, my thinking wasn’t complicated. You wouldn’t need Sophocles to figure it out. It was the young bourgeois’s dread of being bourgeois.”

  “The Sorrows of Young Danforth,” I added, with no doubt that he would get my literary allusion.

  “A precise reference,” Danforth said. “And very German.” He laughed softly, but it was a troubled laugh. “As you are, Paul,” he added.

  “Yes.”

  “But an American now, with an English name,” Danforth added. “Working for our country’s good.”

  I had no idea what Danforth meant by this remark, but something in his gaze alarmed me so that I suddenly retreated to the safety of my notes. “So,” I said, “you were a young bourgeois afraid of a bourgeois life.”

  “Yes,” Danforth said. “As I suspect Clayton well understood when we talked at Winterset that day.”

  Winterset, Connecticut, 1939


  “Thanks for coming, Robert,” Danforth said as he opened the door.

  “You made it sound urgent.”

  They headed out across the wide yard, Clayton dressed in slacks and an open-collared shirt. He’d draped his Princeton sweater over his shoulders, as if he were going to the game against Yale.

  “I want to go with Anna,” Danforth said bluntly. “I’ve thought it through. I’ve gone over what it means. But I want to go with her. I want to be a part of this . . . Project.”

  Clayton watched as a breeze swept the end of the yard, sending a few long-dead leaves forward raggedly, like a column of deserters.

  “I want to be a part of the Project,” Danforth repeated a tad more vehemently.

  He would never be sure if what he’d felt at that moment was terror or elation. He knew only that the narrow stream of his life had abruptly widened.

  “Did you hear me, Robert?” Danforth asked.

  Clayton continued to look away, as if trying to gather his thoughts. When he turned back to Danforth, his face seemed to have lost the last vestiges of its youth.

  “You don’t even know what the Project is,” Clayton said.

  “I don’t care what it is.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Tom,” Clayton said. “Hard slogging’s not for you.”

  Later, Danforth would recall Clayton’s remark often. He would recall it as he tramped through the mud and snow of blasted villages, and as he sat, waylaid for hours, in storm-beleaguered airports and railway stations, although those diffi culties hardly compared to those that still awaited him then.

  “I also feel that Anna shouldn’t go alone,” Danforth added urgently.

  “But that was always the plan,” Clayton said. “She expects to go alone.”

  “But there’s no reason why she should,” Danforth said. “I’d be the perfect cover, wouldn’t I? An importer with plenty of business reasons to be in Europe. And I have contacts. If things got really hot, I’d have the best chance of getting both of us out.”

  “This is not a game, Tom,” Clayton reminded him. “The next step is a big one. We’re talking about an indefinite period in Europe, not a weekend lark.”

  “I know,” Danforth answered. “I have people who can take over the business. I’ll tell my father that Danforth Imports is getting long in the tooth, that it needs new contacts, new sources. That maybe I need rejuvenation too.”

  In later years, Danforth would hear his argument with the sad amusement of an old man confronting the young one he’d once been, and each time he did so, he would remember that Clayton had not once betrayed any feeling for Anna or given the slightest indication that he expected her to survive her mission, whatever it was. Because of that, as his mind careened from villain to villain, Danforth would forever wonder if Clayton had always known that, whether on this mission or the next, Anna would find a way to die.

  “What about Cecilia?” Clayton asked.

  “That’s already settled.”

  This seemed genuinely to surprise Clayton but also to move him one step farther toward considering Danforth’s proposition.

  “Anna is not some little spy,” Clayton said. “What we have in mind is a large effort. We’re not talking about her sitting around with a wireless, tapping out messages. There will be a lot of movement. Diffi cult logistics, once the operation is afoot.” He looked at Danforth very seriously. “You could be killed.”

  Danforth realized that only a few weeks before, he would not have been able to tell if this was a genuine warning or just one of Clayton’s inflations.

  “I know,” Danforth said.

  Clayton studied him a moment. “I’ll talk to Bannion,” he said. “He was the one who actually thought of the Project. He has a right to have some say in what I decide.”

  “I understand,” Danforth told him.

  With that, they walked back to Clayton’s car and said goodbye to each other. Danforth returned to the house, took a seat at the small table where he and LaRoche and Anna had shared their first meal. Then in his mind he journeyed farther back, to the tavern where he’d first seen Anna, frantic and befuddled, a street grotesque in the making, and finally back to that first bit of conversation with Clayton, the small fuse he’d lit, which was now burning more brightly than he’d ever expected. How odd that his own good fortune could prove so hollow, he thought, that the life of a secret agent could attract him so, that for him the pursuit of happiness would seek its measure in the pursuit of peril, and that in this pursuit he would feel for this new life — as he suddenly realized he did — a surprisingly charged tingle of desire.

  Century Club, New York City, 2001

  Desire?

  The curious emergence of this word in the context of his story must have been visible in my face, because Danforth suddenly grew very still, then said, “They are strange, the erotics of intrigue.”

  The erotics of intrigue? I wondered if Danforth was now leading me into the boudoir of his mind.

  “I would sometimes imagine myself endlessly strolling the old streets of Gion at dusk,” Danforth continued, “forever strolling among the geisha and the maiko.”

  “When would you feel this?” I asked.

  “In the prisons and on the trains,” Danforth said. “When I thought of her.”

  “Of Anna?”

  He was clearly reaching for something whose touch still pained him.

  “Geisha means ‘artist’ in Japanese,” he said.

  For a moment he seemed to dissolve into his own memory. “Love as performance, as something . . . acted.”

  It was obvious to me that this was too sensitive a subject for anyone but Danforth alone to pursue, and so I said nothing.

  “The ‘smile of smiles,’ Blake called it,” Danforth added. “It’s where love and deception meet.”

  After this, he fell silent for a time. Then, quite surprisingly, he smiled. “Tell me, Paul, have you ever seen North by Northwest?”

  This question, along with his abrupt change in mood, sent my mind spinning. “The old Hitchcock movie?” I asked. “The one with Cary Grant?”

  “Yes,” Danforth said. His tone took on a slight eeriness, as if his story had now become one of strange occurrences, though the sort that were more ironic than supernatural, the freakishness of real life. “It happened just like that.” He nodded in the general direction of the club’s entrance. “Right there.”

  Century Club, New York City, 1939

  The rain had begun just as Danforth stepped out of the Century Club. He didn’t have an umbrella, and so he turned to the left, toward Fifth Avenue, planning to sprint to the corner, find a shop, buy an umbrella. That was when he felt a grip on his arm that was sharper than any he had ever known; when he looked down toward the grasp that held him, he half expected to see black talons rather than a hand. Then he felt a similar grip on his other arm.

  He saw two men, one on either side of him.

  “Don’t speak,” the man to his left said gruffl y. He was dressed in a dark blue double-breasted suit and wore a gray fedora. “You’re dead if you do.”

  The second man wore a brown suit, also double-breasted, but no hat. He nodded toward a car that idled beside the curb just at the club’s entrance. A third man, this one in a dark green single-breasted suit and wearing a brown hat, had already opened the door and seemed to be grimly awaiting Danforth’s decision.

  “Move forward and don’t speak,” the man in the fedora said.

  The one in the brown suit tightened his grip but then added a slight, surprisingly warm smile. “You’re too young to die, Mr. Danforth.”

  It was dread, and dread alone, that swept over Danforth in what he would always remember as an intense wave of heat that emptied and confused him and in an instant sucked away his will to resist these men. It was as if the sun had suddenly focused all its fiery blast upon the tiny puddle of himself, leaving him dry and dusty, and strangely dead to any sense of himself other than the physical. He was no longer mind or heart. He
was only the body that encased his life, which was in dire peril.

  “Move,” the man in the dark blue suit said sharply.

  Almost without willing it, Danforth drifted forward like a dazed creature floating in the aftermath of some shock, and seconds later he was seated snugly between the men who’d grabbed him, the man in the green suit at the wheel.

  He had not spoken, and this muteness surprised him. He felt like a child between two enormously imposing and unstable parents, unable to question what they did or in any way predict their behavior.

  The car headed north on Broadway, and as it moved, Danforth strung enough of his senses together to begin to contemplate the silent, stern-faced men between whom he was tightly wedged. Who were they? What were they after? Was he being kidnapped? He briefly tried to guess what his father’s reaction might be to that first phone call, how much ransom he might actually pay. This idea gave way to the equally far-fetched notion that this bizarre abduction might be the result of some business dispute of his father’s. The elder Danforth often handled people quite roughly, so it seemed possible that some dissatisfied client or subcontractor might have decided that the usual avenues of redress against his father’s high-handedness were far too slow and uncertain.

  Then, quite suddenly, it became obvious that both of these surmises were dead wrong. It was then and only then that he thought of the Project and considered the possibility that the fear Bannion had expressed and LaRoche had later seconded had been justified all along, that they were truly out there, these American storm troopers, and that Danforth was now in their hands.

  The northern reaches of Manhattan faded behind him, and he suddenly felt unmoored from New York. The city had seemed permanent before, a castle that protected him, and he had thought it changeless and certain. Now it was just a place weakened by events, no longer able to provide the slightest comfort, and in that incapacity, it seemed almost to mock him, as if all his life he’d been fooled by the city, lulled into a pleasant sleep from which he had now been roughly awakened.