The Quest for Anna Klein

Century Club, New York City, 2001

“You must be thinking that Clayton was not exactly a man of the people,” Danforth said with an arid chuckle.

“He does seem very old-school,” I admitted. “But the intelligence agency recruited pretty much exclusively from those ranks back then, didn’t it?”

“Yes, it did,” Danforth said.

“The good news is that our boys weren’t like those upper-class Brits who ended up so disloyal, spying for Mother Russia,” I added. “Philby, Burgess, and the rest. Traitors all.”

“And all equally to be condemned,” Danforth said.

“Of course,” I agreed.

“Even if they believed in their cause?” Danforth asked.

“I wouldn’t care what they believed,” I answered.

Danforth’s gaze betrayed a curious complexity, as if the memory of something won or lost had suddenly returned to him. “Indeed,” he said softly, as if reviewing an old decision or coming to a new one.

“Of course, most of them were fools,” I said, determined to show Danforth that I knew my espionage history, could recite a few details. “The Cambridge Five. Imagine that group, dashing around Europe, delivering a codebook on Gibraltar, like Philby did.” I laughed derisively. “They always struck me as buffoons.”

“Or posing as such,” Danforth said. “There is a lot of acting in this business. Pretending to be afraid. Pretending to be brave. Even pretending to be in love.”

“That would be a cruel pretense, wouldn’t it?” I said.

“Yes, it would,” Danforth answered firmly “Perhaps as cruel as pretending to believe in something when you actually believe the opposite.”

I sensed that this last remark had returned Danforth to his subject.

“Did Clayton believe in whatever he was doing?” I asked.

“Clayton believed absolutely in what he was doing,” Danforth answered. “There was never anything confused or addled about him, nothing in disarray.”

“Not like that woman in the bar, then,” I said, to demonstrate that I’d been listening closely to his tale.

“No,” Danforth said, “nothing like that woman in the bar. Who walked straight to the rear of the place that night, by the way.” His gaze grew distant, a man sinking back into the past. “As a matter of fact, she came so close to me a clump of snow fell off her coat and landed on mine.”

~ * ~

Old Town Bar, New York City, 1939

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said.

As the woman had gone by, a clump of snow had fallen from the bundle of woolens she held and dropped onto Danforth’s overcoat.

“Nothing to worry about,” Danforth told her gently. He noted her face, how young it was, the tragedy of her derangement doubled by her youth.

The woman frantically brushed the snow from the shoulder of Danforth’s coat. “You got a nice coat,” she said. Their eyes met. “It ain’t ruined, is it?”

“Not at all,” Danforth answered. “Really. Nothing to worry about.”

A crooked little smile appeared. “I thought I got that snow off me,” she said with a quick, self-conscious laugh. “But it ain’t easy to get off you once you got it on you.”

“No harm done,” Danforth told her. “It’s just snow.”

Her smile struggled for and lost its place, a string by turns taut and slack. “Anyway, sorry.”

“Nothing to worry about,” Danforth assured her again.

With that, the woman turned and made her way to a table in the far corner. She sat down and fussed with her things, her scarf, her coat, a cloth bag with a long strap, all of which appeared to fight her, making her movements grow more frustrated, almost comically so, as she labored to subdue them. During all of this, she seemed the victim of some vast, inner disarray, one of the city’s future street grotesques, a young woman prematurely sinking into the idiosyncrasies that would doubtless overwhelm her middle years.

“That one will end up in Bellevue,” he said sadly.

“Do you think so, Tom?”

“I do indeed,” Danforth answered firmly. “My God, Robert, that woman couldn’t —”

The glimmer in Clayton’s eyes stopped him cold.

“What?”

“Her code name is Lingua,” Clayton said.

“Code name?”

Clayton glanced to the back of the room. The woman had removed her scarf, revealing a disordered mop of dark, curly hair. “She’s had a rather hard life.”

Danforth’s eyes shot over to the woman in question, her small body still jerkily grappling with an assortment of gear that appeared at every stage determined to thwart her.

Clayton returned his gaze tc Danforth. “So small,” he said. “Not even five two. Perhaps a hundred pounds.” He lifted his hand, and when the barmaid came over, he ordered another round for the two of them. “She’s a genius at languages,” he added once the barmaid had stepped away. “Hence her code name.”

Danforth leaned forward. “What are you telling me, Clayton? That this woman is a ... I don’t even know what to call her.”

Clayton crushed out his cigarette and lit another one. “Her assignment for this evening was to come to the Old Town Bar at precisely seven forty-three. I would be smoking a cigarette. If I wasn’t wearing a red scarf, she was to take a table, have a drink, but in no way approach me or draw attention to herself. If I was wearing the scarf, however, she was to sweep by my table and on some pretext or other get a good look at whomever I was with.” He leaned forward. “And she was to do it in such a way that the person I was with would notice her, so that at any point in the future I could say, ‘Remember that woman in the Old Town Bar?’ and my companion would know instantly whom I was talking about.” He took another draw on his cigarette. “If you hadn’t been here, that convenient clump of snow would simply have melted.” He glanced at his watch and when his eyes lifted toward Danforth again, they were quite grave. “Let’s take a walk, Tom. I want to speak to you very seriously now.”

They got to their feet, left money on the table, and headed for the door. Before going out, Danforth glanced toward the back of the bar, where Code Name Lingua sat; her profile was now blocked by the barmaid, so he could see only a chaos of black curly hair and the small, still madly flitting hands.

Outside, the snow had lightened, but enough had already fallen to cover the sidewalks. A trail of gray footprints followed them westward, then north on Park Avenue, until they reached the wintry stillness of Gramercy Park.

Clayton drew the red scarf more snugly around his neck. “Have you ever heard of Geli Raubal?”

Danforth shook his head.

“She was Hitler’s niece,” Clayton said. “She was found shot dead in a room in her uncle’s apartment in Munich. She used her uncle’s Walther. But Hitler was clearly not in Munich when it happened, and although Geli was shot in the chest when her head was perfectly available to her, the death was ruled a suicide.”

They moved along the border of the park, the snow-covered sidewalk now empty.

“The smart money had been betting that Hitler would self-destruct in some way like this,” Clayton continued. “They thought he was a buffoon and that some scandal would destroy him.” His laughter was laced with irony “But he hasn’t self-destructed . . . and he’s not a buffoon.”

They reached the eastern edge of the park just as the snow began to increase, falling in large, silent flakes that quickly outlined their coats and hats.

After a long silence, Clayton turned and looked squarely into Danforth’s eyes. “There’s going to be a war, Tom. It will start in Europe, of course, but we’ll be drawn into it eventually. And we’re not ready, that’s the point. We’re weak and disorganized. Everything the Germans aren’t. We’re going to need time to build up our war machine.” He paused, and Danforth understood that he was choosing his words very carefully. “There may be a way to get that time. Something no one has thought of. The woman in the bar can be of great help in this . . . project. But she will need to be trained in various skills. She’ll need a place for that. I was thinking of your house in Connecticut. It’s very remote. As you know, my own country property isn’t.”

They had reached the other side of the park. The snow was now falling in great curtains of white, covering sedans and settling like powdered wigs on the tops of traffic lights.

“This woman is willing to risk her life,” Clayton said emphatically. “I’m only asking for a place where she can be trained.”

They walked on for a time, then stopped again. Clayton nodded toward the lighted windows of Pete’s Tavern. “O. Henry wrote ‘The Gift of the Magi’ in that bar,” he said. He exhaled a long breath that seemed extraordinarily weary for so young a man. “What will be your gift of the magi, Tom?” he asked. “Another rug from Tangier, or a project that could help keep your country safe?”

~ * ~

Century Club, New York City, 2001

“That’s an odd reference,” I said. “O. Henry. ‘The Gift of the Magi.’ Are you religious?”

“Not then or now,” Danforth answered. “But we lived in a culturally coherent world, Clayton and I, a world of shared symbols and references. Old Testament. New Testament.”

“A coherence our current enemies now have in abundance,” I added coldly “But which we have somewhat lost.”

Danforth shrugged. “True enough, but would you want it back if you got the Duke of Alva with it too?”

I had no idea who the Duke of Alva was but saw no need to demonstrate that lack of familiarity, and so I said, “Meaning what?”

“That it’s easy to become what you once abhorred,” Danforth answered.

This struck me as rather windy, and probably a quote. I returned to the more relevant subject at hand. “So, Clayton had made his proposal,” I said. “What did you do then?”

“Despite the snow, I started walking uptown,” Danforth answered. “On the way, I thought about the young woman, about what she was willing to do. And I thought about myself. I even thought about O. Henry. I was still turning all that over in my mind when I got to the Plaza.”

~ * ~

Pulitzer Fountain, New York City, 1939

Danforth paused briefly at the fountain in front of the Plaza and thought over his conversation with Clayton. Something had changed and he knew it. A small door had been pried open in him. Perhaps that was Clayton’s gift, that he could sense the locked door inside you and find a key to it.

He fixed his attention on the horse-drawn carriages that slowly made their way in and out of the park. The rhythmic beat of the hooves was muffled, and yet the sound was compelling, a soft, romantic dirge. Most of the passengers were young, and Danforth supposed a good many of them were on their honeymoons. He believed the world was indeed hurtling toward cataclysm, just as Clayton had said, but it would not occur tonight, not for these well-heeled newlyweds in their romantic haze. Soon he would be among them, he thought, newly married and in a carriage with Cecilia, a settled man in a profoundly unsettled world.

He’d walked the entire distance from Gramercy Park, and as he’d walked, a little seed grew in his mind, its roots sinking down and down until he could feel its feathery tendrils wrapping around him.

Abruptly he recalled Razumov, Conrad’s dazed and fumbling revolutionary, how he’d been drawn into a deadly intrigue accidentally, his fate entering his room, he said, because his landlady turned her head. Danforth knew that he was not at all like Razumov. If he chose to be an actor in Clayton’s project, it would be his choice, not one that the blind play of circumstance had thrust upon him.

His mind shifted again, and he imagined the young woman at the Old Town in quite a different bar, a little Bleecker Street dug-out with sawdust on the floor, the woman surrounded by what he assumed must be her type of friends: would-be writers, painters, musicians, all of them young revolutionaries, probably Communists, the entire lot wriggling in the fist of hard times, talking life and art and politics, quoting Marx, Engels, Lenin while they sipped cheap beer and ate whatever the bar provided. He wondered if she was in any way different from such starry-eyed idealists, if she had remotely glimpsed the executioner’s wall through the fog of their windy dialectics, sensed, whether she’d read Saint-Just or not, that revolutions devour their children.

There could be no answer to this, of course. He’d seen only the crazy show of this young woman, and now he doubted if even the curls of her hair were real. Perhaps she was all performance, enjoying the night’s little vignette but in the end lacking the stuff needed to carry out the mission —whatever it was — that Clayton had in mind.

As if he were pushed by an anxious hand, he stepped away from the fountain, crossed Fifth Avenue, and headed toward his apartment on Park.

His father lived in the same building, and as had become his custom, Danforth looked in on him before going to his own apartment.

His father answered the door immediately.

“You shouldn’t have bothered coming here tonight,” he said when he saw Danforth. “You need your rest. You have a meeting with Akmet tomorrow at seven.”

Although the elder Danforth had increasingly removed himself from the daily affairs of the business, he kept a close eye on how it was run, especially any dealings with Akmet, whom he considered little more than a Bedouin trader with a knife up his sleeve.

“The appointment was changed to ten,” Danforth told him.

“So Akmet is feeling his years at last,” the senior Danforth said with a small laugh. “Would you like a drink?”

Danforth nodded.

His father stepped out of the doorway and motioned him inside.

They walked into the front room of the apartment. A large window opened onto the night-bound city. The twinkling lights of its distant buildings locked like a rain of stars halted in their fall.

Danforth’s father poured two scotches, handed one to his son. He was a tall man, lean and fit. It was easy to imagine him as a figure in ages past, the captain of a great vessel, standing on the bridge and plotting his course by the stars; this was precisely what the first Danforth men had been, and by their intrepid scouring of the world, the family fortune had originated. They had sailed the roughest seas, hacked their way through jungle depths, staggered across desert wastes, been shot by muskets and arrows and even poison darts, and suffered all manner of tropical fevers. Compared to these intrepid forebears, Danforth had lived a pampered life, as he well knew, safe and secure in his Manhattan apartment, a student of languages, for God’s sake, with no claim to being different from a thousand other rich boys. A line from Pope crossed his mind, something about how much son from sire degenerates.

“You seem a bit tired,” his father said. “Long day?”

Danforth turned to face the window. Below, the sweep of Central Park gave off an eerie glow in the streetlights. “I was thinking of the Balkans,” he said. “Those thieves who stopped our train.”

His father took a sip of scotch. “Why would you think of that?”

Danforth recalled the young woman at the Old Town Bar, the peril she would be in should she really go to Europe. “Maybe it’s because I haven’t made any memories in a long time,” he said. “You know what I mean? Real memories. Something searing, that you’ll never forget.”

His father laughed. “Count yourself lucky,” he said. “Most lasting memories are bad.”

Count yourself lucky. Danforth repeated in his mind, and he knew he should do precisely that, but he also knew that in some strange, inexpressible way, he couldn’t consider his good fortune entirely good.

~ * ~

He left his father’s apartment a few minutes later, slept uneasily, went to work the next morning. Outside his office, the file clerks and secretaries busied themselves as usual. Dear old Mrs. O’Rourke was as attentive to him as ever, filling out his itinerary, screening his calls, making the appointments she deemed necessary, handing off various salesmen and solicitors to Mr. Fellows, the office manager, or Mr. Stans, the chief shipping clerk, doling out Danforth’s time frugally, as she knew he wanted.

In that way, the week went by, the weekend arrived, and he met Cecilia at a restaurant across from Gramercy Park, not far from the corner where he’d spoken to Clayton the week before and then been left to ponder his friend’s final question.

“Snowing again,” he said almost to himself as he glanced out the window toward the park.

Cecilia unfolded the menu and peered at it closely. “I think I’ll have a Waldorf salad,” she said. “What about you?”

“Caesar salad,” he told her.

The waiter stepped up, and they selected their entrees, Cecilia her fish, Danforth his chicken.

“And to drink?” the waiter asked.

Danforth chose a pouilly-fuissé, then handed the wine list back to the waiter.

“Very good, sir,” the waiter said as he stepped away.

Cecilia reached behind her head.

Danforth knew she was checking for errant strands of hair.

“You look perfect,” he assured her.

She dropped her hand into her lap. “The Vassar reunion is on Saturday. Do you want to come?”

“Of course.”

“It’ll be the first time I introduce you as my fiancé.”

She seemed pleased and happy, and her happiness made Danforth happy too. For a moment, they smiled at each other, as happy couples do, and in that instant Danforth reaffirmed to himself his love for her, his commitment to the life they would share.

The wine came and they toasted their future together, and everything seemed perfect until Danforth glanced out the window, where he saw a young girl fling a handful of snow at a passing stranger; at that instant, he thought of the woman in the bar and found himself imagining her somewhere in the dark grove beyond the window, a lone figure moving away from him until she disappeared . . .

~ * ~

Century Club, New York City, 2001

“. . . into the snow,” Danforth said softly.

He paused and looked toward the window, the snow now falling a little heavier than before. “When is your flight back to Washington, Paul?”

“Not for a few hours,” I answered, though I feared that even this generous stretch of time wouldn’t be enough to finish what was turning into a much more leisurely interview than I’d planned.

“So,” I said crisply. “You were at Gramercy Park again. In a restaurant with your fiancée. You were looking out the window of the restaurant, out into the park, thinking about—”

“Thinking about myself, actually,” Danforth interrupted. He took a sip from his glass. “Have you ever read The Riddle of the Sands?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“I suppose I was a bit like Carruthers in that book,” Danforth told me. “Youth can be a cruel lash, you know. Sometimes a lash you suffer. Sometimes a lash you wield.” He looked for some response to this, but when I gave none, he continued. “Anyway, I called Clayton later that night, after that dinner with Cecilia. I told him that I was interested in the Project. He didn’t seem surprised. But I wasn’t entirely convinced, I told him. I wanted to meet with Lingua. He arranged for us to get together at one of those dimly lit grog houses they still have down on Fourth Avenue.”

“And when you met her,” I asked with a sly smile, “was she ... Mata Hari?”

“She was pretty, if that’s what you mean,” Danforth said with perfect seriousness. “But that wasn’t what I most noticed about her.”

“What did you notice?”

Danforth paused, then said, “How shall I put it?” Once again he appeared to retreat to that earlier time. “That she already seemed to be looking back at life from the bottom of her grave.”

~ * ~

Dugout Bar, New York City, 1939

Danforth arrived first and proceeded to a booth at the far corner of the bar. He’d come to have serious reservations about the meeting, along with even greater ones about getting involved with Clayton’s no-doubt-inflated idea of influencing history. What scheme could possibly do that?

But for all that, he couldn’t deny that he felt a certain anticipation with regard to this meeting; when he saw her come through the front door of the bar, he felt a quickening.

“Hello,” she said when she reached him.

She sat, drew her arms out of her coat, and let it fall behind her back, then she folded her scarf and laid it beside her on the bench, all of this done as if she thought herself alone in the booth. Her gaze was still cast down when she said, “No snow this time.”

There was an olive undertone to her skin that made her look faintly Sicilian; her features were at once delicate and inexpressibly strong, and there was a penetrating sharpness to her gaze.

“My name is Thomas Danforth,” he told her.

“Anna Klein.”

Klein, Danforth thought. It meant “small” in German, and therefore seemed quite appropriate to the woman who sat across from him. He recalled that Clayton had said she was a genius with languages, and he decided to test the waters. “Konnen wir sprechen Deutsch?” he asked.

“Wie sie wunschen.”

For the next few minutes they spoke only German, Danforth’s considerable fluency matched by hers.

“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.

~ * ~

Century Club, New York City, 2001

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.

~ * ~

Danforth Imports, New York City, 1939

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 resume.

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 resume. “I suppose that will be all for now.”

With that, she left the office, 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 office.

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 Danforth 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 difficult 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.

~ * ~