The Quest for Anna Klein

Century Club, New York City, 2001

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.”

~ * ~

Winterset, Connecticut, 1939

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.

“Good morning,” Danforth said as Anna stepped out of the car.

“Hello,” she answered softly.

“Nice place,” LaRoche said, though with little interest, as if he were indifferent to anything beyond his reach.

Anna drew an old, badly frayed coat from inside the car and put it around her shoulders so that it hung like a ragged cape. Her curls were held in place beneath a black scarf, and Danforth noticed that she now wore the scruffy shoes and black stockings he’d seen on the women of the Lower East Side. In such Old-World garb, she looked not only foreign but deeply so, a Moabite like Ruth of old, alone in alien corn.

“May I take your bag?” Danforth asked.

He would have asked this question in just the same gentlemanly way of Cecilia or of any of the other young women he’d squired to nightclubs and fancy restaurants, but he felt certain that Anna must see such courtliness as foppish. What a prissy little wedding-cake figure of a man she must think him, he decided, she who would be on the front line while he remained in America, having brandies at his club, his life compared with hers almost grotesquely free of care.

And yet she said, “Thank you,” and handed the bag to him.

His smile was more a self-conscious twitch. “Good. All right. . . well. . . let’s go in.”

He had built a fire and it was crackling nicely as they entered the main sitting room.

“Would you like something to eat?” he offered.

Anna shook her head. “No,” she said, then looked at LaRoche. “I think we should get started.”

“Okay,” LaRoche said, then, with what Danforth found a shockingly casual movement, he drew a pistol from behind his back and handed it to her. “Take it.”

Anna did, and for the next few minutes Danforth watched as LaRoche acquainted her with the pistol’s heft and the simple mechanics of its use.

“First, you feel it,” he said. “Get a good grip.” He grabbed Anna’s right hand and placed the pistol firmly inside it. “Lift up, down. Get the feel of it.”

As instructed, Anna lifted the pistol, then let her arm drop, then lifted it again.

Such small things, Danforth thought, both the woman and her weapon, so small in comparison to the forces against which they would be used.

“See, not so heavy,” LaRoche said.

Anna nodded.

“Like a bottle of milk,” LaRoche added.

Anna turned the pistol over, looked at it from each side.

“It’s a Smith and Wesson three-fifty-seven-magnum revolver,” LaRoche told her.

Danforth glanced down at the gun as LaRoche continued his description of its technical superiority, a recitation that seemed designed to convince Anna that it was the finest pistol ever produced, one in whose performance she could feel the greatest possible confidence. It was small and black with an elliptical design on the side and a three-inch barrel that Danforth assumed would be called snub-nosed, and which he guessed would make the gun easy to conceal.

LaRoche drew a box of cartridges from the pocket of his overcoat, and in three simple steps taught Anna to load, unload, and reload it, timing her efforts with an old pocket watch until her juggling of cartridges and pistol became sufficiently smooth. He closed the lid of the watch and peered out into the woods behind the house.

“You try it now,” he said.

With that lackadaisical instruction, he led Anna out the back door, Danforth following behind, feeling very much a fifth wheel and yet undeniably curious as to how this diminutive young woman would handle the weapon.

LaRoche stopped a few yards out into the grounds, then pointed to a small tree in the distance. “Walk there.”

Anna did as she was told, her feet leaving gray tracks through the snow.

“Stop,” LaRoche called.

Anna halted.

LaRoche looked at Danforth. “No need for you to stay,” he said in a voice that made it clear that Danforth’s continued presence was both unnecessary and unwanted.

Danforth nodded and headed back to the house. He’d reached its back porch when he heard LaRoche call, “Aim.”

He turned and saw Anna, small and still, standing before a slender maple. From where he watched, she appeared to be very close to the tree, so close that when she lifted the pistol, its barrel seemed only a few feet from the trunk.

Would she be that close to peril? Danforth wondered. Would danger come so near? He imagined her trapped in a garret in some foreign town or village, men coming up the stairs, pounding on her door, then bursting through it; Anna reaching for the pistol at her bedside, aiming, firing again and again, though knowing that the men would keep coming, whole armies of them streaming through the door.

“Fire,” LaRoche said quite casually, the way he might have asked her to pass the salt.

Anna fired; her shoulder jerked backward slightly, and she gave what seemed to be, at least from a distance, a quickly contained shudder.

“Anna?” Danforth whispered before he could stop himself.

She didn’t turn but stood facing the tree, her arm stretched out, the report of the pistol still reverberating through the surrounding woods.

“One step back,” LaRoche called. “Fire.”

She stepped back and fired a second time.

“Step back,” LaRoche said. “Fire.”

Again, Danforth envisioned a dreadful scene: Anna rushing about some foreign room, reaching for the pistol as the door bursts open to reveal a troop of German soldiers or policemen or some other gang of men who’d come for her. But this time he imagined the scene with no hint of his earlier inner quaking and so he felt himself, even if just in his imagination, in training alongside Anna, both of them growing more able and more ready to face her peril.

Danforth went inside. The shooting went on for several minutes, Anna emptying and reloading the gun again and again, though Danforth knew that no matter what the scenario of her discovery and capture, she would likely never get off more than a few shots. LaRoche had clearly not been apprised of this, however, so his training was all about firing and reloading and firing again, as if he expected Anna to be holed up and fending off a sustained attack. Perhaps Clayton had told him just that, Danforth thought, given LaRoche the idea that Anna was part of some larger contingent, a ruse designed to lead LaRoche’s mind in the wrong direction.

After a time, the shooting stopped. Danforth glanced through the cold-misted window. In the distance, LaRoche and Anna stood shoulder to shoulder, her small hand cupped in LaRoche’s disproportionately large one so that it was impossible to determine which of them actually held the revolver.

For a moment they talked, LaRoche clearly giving more instructions. Then they turned and came back into the house. By then LaRoche had tucked the pistol into his belt, as if he thought Danforth’s seeing it might disturb his tender sensibilities.

“She’s good,” he said quietly. He looked at Anna. “To fire is easy. The will to fire is hard.”

Anna sat down on the sofa, a large window behind her, and through it came brilliant morning light.

“We go back tomorrow morning,” LaRoche said to her.

She nodded, then looked toward the window just as a deer emerged from the edge of the woods, rather scrawny and with a patch of hairless skin at the side of its neck.

“Beautiful,” she said, her eyes trained on the deer, her gaze ever more intense, a slight smile on her lips.

LaRoche laughed. “With what you’ve learned today, you could kill it with one shot.”

Anna continued to stare at the deer, but her expression had taken on something distantly sad and tragic. Quite inexplicably, Danforth suddenly thought of the Triangle Factory fire, the many young women who’d leaped from the sweatshop’s flaming windows. She didn’t speak, but as he would later recall, many times, it seemed to him that all those falling girls were in her eyes.

~ * ~

Century Club, New York City, 2001

Danforth fell silent for a moment, then bent forward and massaged a point just above his right knee. “In memory, most people come and go,” he said. “But a few leave parts of themselves inside you.” He released his leg and drew back. “Like shrapnel.”

There was something troubling in his recollection of this incident, of course, and I felt a distant rumbling in his tale. Still, at that moment I found myself less concerned with Danforth’s faded memories of Anna than with the Project itself, the way it was emerging as an endeavor put together by rank amateurs.

“I must say the whole thing seems rather farcical,” I told Danforth. “I mean, you didn’t even know what Clayton’s plan actually was, or Anna’s role in it.”

Danforth’s eyes glimmered with an eerie wintriness, like a streetlamp in the darkness, a metal blued by cold and laced with snow. “Farcical,” he repeated. “Yes, I suppose it could be seen that way.”

He added nothing to this but abruptly got to his feet, buttoned the middle of his three-button jacket, and waved me to the right. “The dining room is this way,” he said.

I looked at him, startled. “I didn’t know we were having lunch.”

“Come,” Danforth said. “You need nourishment.”

With some reluctance, I rose and walked beside him, the two of us moving at a leisurely pace toward a far room where tables were set, all covered with white tablecloths.

“We were at Winterset,” I reminded Danforth as we made our way to the tables. “Anna was being trained.”

At the entrance to the dining room, Danforth grasped my arm in the manner of an old man, a gesture that showed a frailty he’d concealed before.

“So to you it seemed a farce,” he said in a tone that struck me as painfully searching, like a fish striving with all its wounded power to comprehend the hook.

“But not to you, I take it?” I asked cautiously.

For a moment Danforth gave no response, merely continued forward, though now with a slight tottering, as if he were seeking purchase on a perilous ledge. Then he said, “No, but I wish it had.”

“Why?”

“Because I might have grasped the truth.”

“What truth?”

“That the question was never whether she would live or die,” Danforth answered finally, his voice sounding cracked and worn with use, like the pages of old books, “for that had been decided long ago.”

~ * ~

PART II

The Point of a Spoon

~ * ~

Century Club, New York City, 2001

I had learned by then that Danforth strolled in and out of his story rather fluidly, as a man might drift from one room to another in a sprawling house. There was no fanfare attached to these transitions, nothing to signal a new chapter save a sudden play in his eyes, a tiny light going on or off. Anna seemed always a lingering presence in everything he said, a ghost that followed him no matter where he went. Or was he following the ghost, shifting here or there whenever she beckoned him with some gesture only he could see?

For all that, once we reached the table reserved for him, Danforth made no mention of her but talked of the club’s furnishings until the waiter arrived. He ordered the beef Wellington and a glass of Bordeaux. I ordered prime rib and said no to the wine.

“I need to keep my wits about me,” I explained.

“Indeed you do,” Danforth said, and added quite pointedly, “especially now.”

His words seemed darkly instructional, and he followed them with a brief speech about “desperate times” and “dangerous circumstances” that could easily lead to some rash action one might later regret, a disquisition that was quite broad and without specifics and yet still seemed intimately connected to his story. “One should never embrace a mental process that is a wall rather than a gate,” he said cryptically at one point. At another, he said, “The tragedy of human history is that it takes too long for gods to fail.”

These were windy epigrams, but I dutifully wrote them down, a gesture he noted but didn’t seem to trust.

Our lunches arrived. Danforth touched his wine to my water. “Bon appétit,” he said.

We ate with little or no further discussion of the Project. Instead, Danforth rather insistently kept our conversation on my background. He wanted to know if I spoke any foreign language fluently. None fluently, I told him. I’d taken German in high school, as I’d mentioned, and picked up a little Spanish during visits to my grandfather in South America. For a time, Danforth tested what remained of my skills, but my Spanish proved so rudimentary that he finally said simply, “Well, back to English,” and from there inquired about my studies at Columbia and the career track I saw for myself in the future. Then, rather oddly, he commented on how life seemed to be a landscape marked by what he called “moral fault lines” to whose “subtle trembling” we should remain alert.

Then, with lunch behind us, Danforth put down his fork and returned to the past.

“To love not wisely, but too well,” he said. “That’s a moral fault that has many different aspects.”

“A caution that comes from Shakespeare,” I said, rather obviously making the point that I’d read Othello.

“To love a woman and not know who she is,” Danforth went on. “Or a man and not know what he did.” His gaze briefly intensified. “To love a cause but not know where it leads. They are different in many ways, but in one way they are the same.”

“In what way the same?” I asked indulgently.

“In that one simple parable can contain them all,” Danforth said.

This was the second time Danforth had referred to his story as a parable, though now his reference seemed more complicated, as if he were trying to convince me that this would be a multilayered tale, at once sweeping and intimate, by turns adventure story, morality play, and God knows what else, but at its end a narrative worth my time. His need to make his case seemed rather sad to me, making me feel that, rather than being an intelligence analyst on assignment, I was a volunteer at an old-age home, sent to sit by the bed and feign rapt attention to some old duffer as he recalled the many Chevrolets he’d owned.

Danforth appeared to see all this and so returned to the concrete aspects of his story.

“After the war began, we could do it differently,” he said. “There was no need for secret training. We simply dropped people out of the sky.”

He seemed still in awe and admiration of these night-bound, behind-the-lines jumpers, the courage their actions had required, and his voice began to show the old grief he felt, that so many had been lost.

“It was amazing how little they carried, the ones who were dropped behind the lines once the war began,” he said. “An entrenching tool for burying the chute, a compass for finding your way. A pair of glasses for disguise. It’s quite surprising how well they work, Paul. Just a pair of spectacles with clear glass lenses. It gives you a totally different appearance.” He rolled his eyes upward slightly. “False identification, of course. One needed that. A map. Matches for secret writing. A little chocolate for energy. A razor. A dozen or so detonators if you were going to blow something up. A wireless to make reports.” He thought a moment, then added, “Oh, and a revolver . . . for that tight spot you dread.”

I found this a rather impressive display of insider knowledge, but more important, it raised the question of Danforth’s own wartime activities.

“Were you dropped?” I asked.

“Yes, but that was several years after my work with the Project had been completed,” Danforth answered. “My target was Sète, a little fishing village between Marseille and Barcelona, on the Mediterranean. The poet Paul Valery was born there. He said something I’ve often recalled over the years, that a poem is never finished, only abandoned. It’s the same with an ideal, I think, or a quest.” He shrugged. “Anyway, Sète was quite lovely, with its canals.”

“Why were you sent there?” I asked.

“To find out if Spain was truly neutral,” Danforth answered. “Which it was. Spain had already been bled white by its civil war. Besides, the Germans had nothing but contempt for the Spanish, and the Spanish knew it. ‘For the Germans, Africa begins at the Pyrenees,’ my Spanish contacts used to say. Meaning that Spain was Africa to them, impoverished and inept, unworthy of consideration.”

“Spanish contacts. You crossed into Spain?”

“Yes,” Danforth said. “I pretty much kept in the vicinity of Saragossa. My mission was to watch for any sign that arms were moving out of Spain and toward Vichy France.”

“Were you still with Anna at that time?” I asked.

And suddenly it was there, that little light going off, then on, then off again, and that seemed to flash distantly but insistently, like a warning signal at the entrance to a place Danforth both did and did not wish to go.

He lifted his glass, but rather than drink, he swirled the wine softly, gazing at its ruby glow. “No, I was not with Anna,” he said. His hand stopped and the wine’s surface calmed again. “Blood red,” he said, and appeared lost in that thought.

“The training,” I said in order to bring him back. “We were last at Winterset during Anna’s training.”

“Oh, yes,” Danforth said. “There was a good deal more training, of course. LaRoche was a genius at destruction.”

“Destruction?” I asked. “But he was only teaching her to use a pistol for self-defense, wasn’t he?”

“At first,” Danforth said. “But there were other skills to be learned.”

“What skills?”

“Those of a saboteur,” Danforth said. “The word comes from the Dutch, you know, from when Dutch workers threw their wooden shoes, their sabots, into the cogs of the textile machines that threatened their jobs.”

“So you never lost your interest in languages,” I said.

“No,” Danforth said. “Because words are important, Paul. Do you know how Sartre defined a Jew?”

I shook my head.

“As someone whom someone else calls a Jew,” Danforth answered. He looked at me sharply. “It was all in the word, never in the person.” He let this sink in, then added, “A word like that, Jew, is an explosive.”

The way Danforth pointedly made this remark gave me the impression that he had long been planning it and that other such remarks lay like mines in the road ahead.

“A word is an explosive,” I repeated, with no hint that I found the comment a trifle overdramatic, as well as trite.

“Yes,” Danforth said. “Which brings me back to Anna.”

~ * ~

Winterset, Connecticut, 1939

Danforth had watched during the past few weekends as the cellar of the house was converted into a sinister laboratory. LaRoche had set up tables and covered them with an array of materials. There were scores of glass bottles filled with various powders and liquids. He’d brought in brass scales as well, along with a black marble mortar and pestle. To these he’d added a large collection of items he thought might prove useful: a briefcase with a false bottom, a clock and several wristwatches, samples of European electrical switches, sundry dyes and polishes, and a supply of detonators. Each weekend had brought another lesson, and with each weekend, Anna had grown more adept in the secret arts of sabotage. There’d been more shooting lessons, as well as a great deal of training on the wireless LaRoche had unloaded from the back of his car the last week of February.

With each stage of Anna’s training, LaRoche grew more confident in her abilities, so in the last days of winter, he decided to take the final step.

“Today we’ll make a bomb,” he told Anna on that particular day.

He directed her over to a table on which he’d set various materials.

“This is potassium chlorate,” he said. “You can kill slugs with that, but it’s good for a bomb too.” He pointed to a glass jar filled with a white powder that looked as innocent as confectioners’ sugar. “That’s potassium nitrate. Plenty in fertilizer.” The next exhibit was potassium permanganate, which LaRoche said could be found in a common throat gargle. After that, he picked up a can of what appeared to be ordinary wood stain. “Ferric oxide in this.” The next can was silver paint. “In here you’ve got ground aluminum.” He gave an almost comic shrug. “It’s easy to find stuff for a bomb.”

But it was not enough merely to make a bomb, LaRoche added. For, once it was made, a bomb had to be hidden, and the best way to do this was to disguise it as something else.

“Like this,” he said as he picked up a large lump of coal. “Coal is soft. Very easy to carve out and place a bomb in. There’s coal everywhere in Europe. Big stacks in the basement, right by the boiler. Blow a building sky-high.”

Danforth envisioned the moment when Anna’s new courses of study all abruptly came together in a fiery explosion, a building shuddering somewhere in the heart of Europe, great tongues of flame climbing charred walls and leaping out of shattered windows; Anna would be some hours away at that point, he hoped, perhaps already set up in another town, connecting other fuses to other timers, preparing the next action.

By then he would have settled back into his work at Danforth Imports, he thought, be taking the usual calls, making the usual decisions. He’d be married to Cecilia, settled into the Connecticut house, perhaps with a baby on the way; he’d lounge in a spacious living room reading the latest report on the war in Europe while outside workmen raked fall leaves and plowed under the last of Cecilia’s summer garden.

Danforth couldn’t pinpoint why he found this vision of his future unsettling, though he knew it was more than simply his familiar sense that the most adventurous part of his life had already passed. There was something in the deeply serious nature of Anna’s training, as well as her tirelessness in learning LaRoche’s dark arts, that made him feel small and insignificant. He thought of the Apollonius statue of a pugilist at rest, its battered face and body. Here was a man who’d known the worst of it, who’d been seasoned by grave experience. It was not for nothing, Danforth admitted to himself, that there was no statue of the man who’d held his towel.

This was a troubling thought, and so he was relieved when a ringing phone took him out of it. He turned away from Anna’s training and rushed up the cellar stairs. The phone rested on a stand near the front door.

“Hello,” he said.

“I’ve sent you a client,” Clayton told him. “He’s interested in French Impressionism. He thought you might have contacts in Paris. Be at the town bandstand. Two thirty. He’ll be wearing a light brown jacket. There’ll be a sprig of lavender in its lapel.”

“Lavender?”

Clayton laughed. “You remember those fields, don’t you, Tom?”

“Yes,” he said.

“The bandstand,” Clayton repeated. “Two thirty.”

Danforth returned the phone’s hand set to its cradle, walked out onto the broad front porch, and peered into the forest. Soon the trees would be bristling with green buds, and here and there the first leaves would begin to rustle in the warming air. Where, he wondered, would Anna be when the first flowers bloomed?

Suddenly a noise came from the cellar, a small pop, tightly controlled and heavily muffled, followed by LaRoche’s hard laugh.

Danforth wondered if Anna had laughed along with him, or at least allowed herself a smile, pretending for that brief moment that it was all a game.

The drive to the town park was short, and it was only two o’clock, but Danforth saw no reason to remain at the house. He could take the valley road, the one that wound along a cold blue stream, and approach the town from an unexpected direction, as if his mind were now focused on surprise attack.

On the drive into town, he thought of Anna. They’d had few conversations at work, and all of them had been on business matters. They never met outside business hours, save for the weekends at the house, during which LaRoche had kept her almost entirely to himself, teaching her skills that she then had to demonstrate over and over until the most complex procedures flowed from her with the technical fluidity of an old hand. From time to time the three of them shared meals together, but even then LaRoche focused the conversation on her training, asking her questions, noting her answers, sometimes nodding with satisfaction but otherwise keeping his opinion of her to himself, though Danforth supposed that he was reporting his evaluations to Clayton.

So what did he know about this woman? Danforth asked himself now. Little beyond her steeliness and the fact that she was very bright. At the office, she quickly grasped every element of her training in imports, an intelligence Mrs. O’Rourke had mentioned on several occasions. At Winterset, she’d mastered Morse code and how to operate and repair a wireless with the same effortless alacrity with which she’d learned to fire a pistol and was now learning to make a bomb. He’d already noticed her astonishing ability to slip in and out of identities and to do it so quickly and completely that she seemed briefly to lose herself within them.

But it was her skill at languages that had most impressed Danforth. In conversation with her, he enjoyed the way she could move seamlessly from one to the other. Once she’d told him that it was impossible to know a people if you did not know their language and that if she were granted many lives she would spend them learning yet more languages. But you will have only one life, he thought suddenly as he was driving into town, and then, with a sense of distress, he added, And perhaps quite a short one.

Years later, as he stood in the bombed-out remains of Plötzensee Prison, Danforth remembered these thoughts, the way they’d come to him on the drive into town, and it occurred to him that love is, at bottom, simply the deepest of all sympathies, and that perhaps his love for Anna had begun the morning he’d watched her by the window and thought of all the immigrant girls like her, the arduousness of their labor, their limited prospects, and seen Anna as somehow their representative in his life. Still later it had been her tenderness that called to him, as he remembered on that same bleak occasion, the shattered walls of the prison perfectly symbolic of his own shattered life; after that it had been her resolve that drew him, and following that, her sacrifice, so in the end it seemed impossible that a love built on such a multifarious foundation could ever crumble and then boil up again as ire.

He reached the town in a few minutes. It was moving at its customarily slow pace as he drove down its single main street. There was a grocery store and a gas station, along with a clothing store and a five-and-dime. The town was typically American, quiet for the most part, and very neighborly. Danforth thought of the moment he’d committed himself to Clayton’s project and allowed himself to believe that by giving himself to that effort — even if only by providing small assistance — he was doing something to preserve and protect this little town and all the others like it. It might even be enough, though this possibility paled when he thought of Anna, the deadly skills she was being taught and would at some point employ. Providing a country house for her training was hardly at the same level.

The bandstand was surrounded by a small park, and as he approached it, Danforth saw a man in a brown jacket make his way toward it from the opposite direction. The man wore a dark hat pulled down low, like the figure he’d seen outside his apartment window, and Danforth felt certain that it was, in fact, the same man.

“So, French Impressionism,” Danforth said when he reached him.

The other man appeared darkly amused. “These little games will seem silly to us one day.” His tone was nostalgic, as if, like Anna, he too had already glimpsed his fate. He offered his hand. “I’m Ted Bannion.”

Bannion, Danforth thought, an Irish name. Unlike LaRoche, this man seemed well suited to his name, with his light hair and blue eyes, along with something in his manner that made it easy for Danforth to picture him in the execution yard of Kilmainham Gaol, shoulder to shoulder with Connolly and Pearce.

“Clayton has never mentioned you,” Danforth said.

Bannion plucked the sprig of lavender from the lapel of his jacket and tossed it onto the ground, as if to demonstrate his distance from such foolish trappings.

“I’ll be in charge of Anna once her training is finished,” Bannion said.

“She’s being trained for lots of things, it seems,” Danforth said cautiously, hoping he might get some hint as to what the Project actually was.

“So that she can train others,” Bannion said by way of explanation. His smile was bleak. “Our Joan of Arc.”

This seemed a hint that the Project was much broader than Danforth had previously imagined, Anna not one of a small cadre but the spearhead of a large force.

“Train them in several different languages,” Bannion added.

His accent was very faint, Danforth thought, and it seemed layered with other inflections, like a voice behind a mask.

“That’s her greatest asset,” Bannion said.

“Not her courage?” Danforth asked.

Bannion shrugged. “There’s never a shortage of courage,” he said. “It’s skill that’s hard to find.” He appeared sad that this was the case, that humanity was very good at meeting danger, very poor at knowing what to do about it. A realization of this fallen state, mankind nobly brave but helplessly incompetent, swam into his eyes, and Danforth thought it gave him the look of a disappointed god.

“Where did you meet Clayton?” Danforth asked.

“At one of his talks at the library,” Bannion said. “He seemed to think that the wealthy had an obligation to do something. I had an idea of what that might be.”

“I still don’t know what the Project is, by the way,” Danforth told him.

“With any luck, you never will,” Bannion said flatly.

“It’s very ambitious, I’m sure,” Danforth said. “Clayton’s not one for small measures.”

“Very ambitious, yes,” Bannion said, clearly refusing to reveal any part of the Project. “Has he told you that I was a Communist?”

“No.”

“Oh, yes, I was a great singer of the ‘Internationale,’” Bannion said with edgy bitterness. “One of those kind of Communists.” He appeared still seared by the experience, a man cheated by a clever swindler. “I wasted years of my life marching under that banner.” Those lost years were obviously a source of deep resentment; Bannion seemed raw and charged with violence, a man who’d caught the only woman he had ever loved sleeping with another man. “Clayton prefers people whose gods have failed,” he added.

“What god failed Anna?” Danforth asked.

To that question, Bannion gave the saddest answer Danforth had ever heard.

“Life.”

Danforth felt that this was true and wondered if it was in this terrible failure she had found the steeliness he saw in her.

“Anna’s going to be brought in earlier than we thought,” Bannion told him. “Clayton wanted me to tell you this in person. So that we could meet. You won’t have further dealings with her once she leaves for Europe.”

So she would be a bird in his life, Danforth thought, a bird for whom he had briefly provided a nest and who would soon take flight and then simply disappear over the horizon.

“When is she leaving?” he asked.

“We’d like her in place within a few weeks. No later than mid-May.”

“Why the hurry?”

“Because things are heating up, as I’m sure you’re aware,” Bannion answered.

“Where is she going?”

“There’s no need for you to know that,” Bannion answered. A disquiet surfaced in his eyes, as if he’d suddenly spotted trouble in the distance. “And once she’s gone, you should never mention her to anyone.”

“I understand,” Danforth said. “I’ll never say her name again.”

Bannion gave no hint of how he received this declaration, only glanced to the right, where a beat-up sedan had come to a halt at the far end of the park. There were two men in the front seat and one in the back, a configuration that appeared to draw Bannion’s grim attention. He waited until one of the men got out and walked into a nearby store, then he turned back to Danforth. “You should be aware that they may already be onto the Project,” he said. “And if so, they’ll stop at nothing. So right now, all of us have to watch our backs, because they could be anyone, anywhere.”

Danforth found this assertion slightly paranoid. “Who is this mysterious ‘they’?” he asked doubtfully.

“German sympathizers, of course,” Bannion answered. “The type who break up anti-German rallies. If they find out what we’re doing, they’ll do whatever has to be done to stop it.” Bannion looked at Danforth in a way that made Bannion’s doubts about him quite plain. “So the point is to get Anna in place before anyone has a chance to betray her.”

“I would never betray her,” Danforth said firmly.

Bannion’s smile was hard to read. “Let’s hope you’re never tested.”

With that he turned and made his way across the wintry park.

There was something both comforting and scary in his determined stride, Danforth thought, the robotic severity of a man who could be trusted to do whatever had to be done, no matter how extreme. Such was the way of men whose Great Ideal had failed them, he supposed, and in that failure left scar tissue on their souls.

With Bannion gone, Danforth had no reason to remain in the park, but he found himself compelled to linger there awhile. He did not know why, save that the park gave him a sense of comfort, of rootedness. The bandstand was freshly painted, the perfect symbol of a small town whose inhabitants had no reason to mistrust the world. The still-naked trees, the distant swings, the small fountain, all of it now seemed terribly vulnerable, a naive realm that had to be protected by men like Bannion, who he suddenly imagined as quite capable of anything. This had not come from what Bannion had said but from the flinty nature of the exchange, the dead earnestness he’d seen in Bannion’s eyes. Danforth knew that in a less perilous time, he would have been the last to entrust any aspect of his country’s good to such a man. But now history seemed to demand the Bannions of the world, men without reserve, men without limits, men who cared little for the usual dictates of governance and who made those who could be ruled by them seem weak and dithering.

Ah, so this is what it feels like, he thought as Bannion got into the car at the far end of the park, to lose your innocence.

~ * ~

Century Club, New York City, 2001

I felt a pang of disappointment. To lose his innocence? Was this to be Danforth’s story, some little moment of moral quavering? If so, it was familiar in the extreme. Worse, it was irrelevant, since Danforth’s personal transformation, however trivial or profound, had nothing to offer in terms of useful tactical information. I could almost hear Dr. Carlson, my superior at the center, fire off the inevitable question: Is that all you got out of him, a tired tale of lost innocence?

“Innocence,” I said blandly, “that’s a hard thing to nail down, don’t you think?”

Danforth picked up the dessert menu. “Not in terms of knowing who they actually are,” he said. “We always know who the innocent are.”

“But as a concept, it’s somewhat complicated, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Only when it should more accurately be called naiveté,” Danforth said. “I had a contact in the French Resistance.” He continued to peruse the menu as he spoke. “He was of no great value. A courier, not much more. He was arrested and taken to Hotel Lutetia. Do you know it?”

I shook my head.

“It’s at forty-five boulevard Raspail,” Danforth went on. “During the war it served as Gestapo headquarters in Paris, and so there were quite a few interrogation rooms. Augustin was taken to one of these rooms, of course. He was interrogated for a while. There were a lot of people screaming in his face and a few stinging slaps, but nothing really unbearable. He didn’t know anything, so he couldn’t tell them anything. After a time, the treatment became more severe, and before it was over he was pretty well broken.” He looked up from the menu. “The apple tart isn’t bad.”

I nodded.

Danforth returned to the menu, studying it thoughtfully as he continued. “All of this shouting and slapping was done by Germans.”

He put down the menu and summoned the waiter. “The apple tart for me. And you, Paul?”

“I’ll have the same.”

The waiter stepped away.

“Out of the blue, a uniformed Paris policeman came into the room,” Danforth continued. “And do you know what went through Augustin’s mind? It’s over. That’s what he thought. Here is a French policeman. He will stop this immediately. What a wonderful thing to have believed.” His smile was anything but cheerful. “And how much more wonderful had it been true.” He paused, eyeing me closely, then went on. “But the French policeman simply stood at attention and watched a little more rough treatment, this time with cigarettes. I’m sure you know what I mean.”

“Yes.”

“And when one of Augustin’s torturers took out a fresh cigarette to continue the game, this same French policeman clicked his heels and dutifully stepped over and lit it for him.” He looked at me starkly. “Now that is a loss of innocence, Paul, a loss of belief in your own countrymen that makes my slight moral twinges by the bandstand entirely laughable “

I was relieved to hear this, since it was at one with my earlier thought and gave me to understand that wherever Danforth’s tale ultimately led, it would not be to some effete notion of wounded idealism.

“You’re right,” I said confidently. “Perspective gets lost in little moral misgivings.”

“Do you think so, Paul?” Danforth asked. “I’m more of a mind to think that perspective gets lost in moral certainties.” He shrugged. “Which only means that no one was ever burned at the stake by a doubter.”

Before I could reply to this curious remark, Danforth eased back slightly, and for a moment he seemed uncertain as to how he should proceed. “So much in life comes as a surprise,” he added softly, and I knew he was once again moving down the twisty path of his tale. “Things we were so sure of. People we thought we knew so well but perhaps did not know at all.” He added nothing to this; instead, he craned his neck slightly, so that I heard the brittle grind of ancient bones.

“Old gears,” he said. “No oil can smooth them.” Then, again moving down a familiar trail, he returned to that long-ago afternoon. “She was in the woods when I got back from the bandstand,” he said.

~ * ~

Winterset, Connecticut, 1939

She was in the woods when Danforth got back to Winterset. He caught only fleeting glimpses of her as she moved through line after gently swaying line of slender trees. She was walking slowly, as he would time and again recall, dressed in a dark blouse and a long equally dark skirt that fell below her ankles. She’d flattened her wild hair beneath the Old-World babushka common to the women he’d seen toiling in the frozen fields of Eastern Europe. In that way she suddenly seemed beyond any future assimilation, a woman fiercely, almost willfully, separated from himself and that part of his country that was most like him.

And yet, it was this that inexplicably attracted him, the allure of something so foreign it called to him in the way of indecipherable languages, and that returned him to the haunting wonder of his boyhood days. She was like a city he didn’t know but wanted to, a vista he’d never seen but yearned to see. Bannion had been right. There was no shortage of courage. Every battlefield was strewn with it. But he sensed in Anna a fatalism she had long ago accepted, making her seem like a woman walking toward her future just as religious martyrs walked toward their execution sites, as if there, and only there, they would find fulfillment.

“Don’t get lost,” he said when he reached her. “These woods are deep.”

“I never wander far,” she replied.

He leaned against one of the trees and glanced back toward the house. “No more training today?”

“No, there’s more,” she answered.

She added nothing else, her silence like a cloak around her shoulders.

“You may be going earlier than we’d thought,” he told her.

She nodded, and an errant strand of hair broke free from the scarf and curled at the side of her right ear.

“No second thoughts?” he asked.

She shook her head.

With that, she turned away from him, and for a moment continued to face away, her features now in profile, her attention focused on the stone bridge in the distance.

“Do you want to walk over there?” Danforth asked.

She nodded, and together they made their way out of the grove and into the wilder woods, with its newly sprouting undergrowth, and finally to the bridge.

During the awkward silence that followed, he made a point of not looking at her.

At last he said, “What are you thinking about?”

She stared out over the stream. “Ellis Island,” she said. “The view from my window.”

“Your window?”

She nodded. “I had trachoma, so I had to stay on the island for a while. My bed was near a window. I could see the big buildings. It was like a make-believe city. Especially at night. The lights fell like fireworks, only frozen.”

“Very different from where you came from?” Danforth asked.

“Yes.”

“Why did you leave your native country?”

“To escape the killing,” Anna said.

Danforth imagined the smoldering villages of the Pale, a half a million Jews crowded into small-town ghettos where they periodically fell victim to renegades of every sort, bandits and gangs of deserters. It was a vast region through which he’d traveled with his father as a boy and through which he would pass again as a man, after the war, those same crowded villages now emptied of their Jews.

She faced him. “How about you?” she asked. “Clayton says you went everywhere when you were a child. What was the most beautiful thing you ever saw?”

He told her about Umbria, the village of Assisi, the valley that swept out from the terraces of the town, how beautiful it was, almost unreal.

“When I remember it, I see it more as a painting,” he said at the end of his description.

Anna’s gaze fell toward the swiftly flowing water. “And what’s the most beautiful thing you’ve never seen?” she asked.

It was an odd question, Danforth thought, but he had an answer for it.

“According to my father, it’s the Seto Sea from Mount Misen,” he said. “He saw it, and said it was like a dream.”

“Where is it?” Anna asked.

“Japan,” Danforth answered. “On a little island called Miyajima.”

“Then you must go there,” she said. She glanced toward the house. “I’d better be getting back. LaRoche is waiting.”

They turned and together walked to the house; in the distance, Danforth could see LaRoche standing on the porch, watching them.

“We still have a lot of work,” LaRoche said to Anna when they reached him.

Danforth saw that LaRoche had already been told that Anna was to leave quite soon, though there was no hint that this speeded-up schedule disturbed him. And yet in the following days, small cracks began to appear in LaRoche’s otherwise granite exterior. Danforth noticed it in the way he grew more tender toward Anna during their sessions, and in the way his voice lost its coldness, a change in manner that made him appear almost fatherly in regard to her. He might have been teaching her to ride a bike, Danforth thought, or erect a tent, or any of a hundred other innocuous skills, and he sensed that LaRoche had come to fear for her and so had grown more gentle, as a parent might be more gentle with a child stricken by some dread disease.

~ * ~

Some two weeks later, Danforth and LaRoche sat alone in the front room, enjoying the final cigars of the evening. LaRoche had drunk considerably more than usual, and in that loosened state, he began to talk about the old kingdom of Azerbaijan, where he’d spent some time in the region’s busy trade-route capital of Baku.

“It was all silk and saffron then,” LaRoche said in a nearly musical way that suggested he’d heard these words in a song. His eyes closed with an intoxicated languor. “With towers and minarets, and plenty of oil too. Like Texas.” He leaned back, more relaxed than Danforth had ever seen him. “Everybody well fed. Even the camels.” He laughed. “Especially the camels.” Suddenly his face soured. “Then the czar stuck in his nose. The Azeris and the Armenians started cutting one another’s throats.” He stubbed out his cigar with the violence of one who knew what had been consumed in these ethnic fires. “And after the czar, the Bolsheviks.”

For a moment he seemed lost in a blasted idyll. Briefly, he watched a curl of blue smoke rise from the smoldering cigar. Then he grabbed his scotch and downed it in a single, tortured gulp.

“She’s a good woman, Anna,” he said, then rose to his feet and walked out the door.

Danforth sensed that he was being summoned, that LaRoche had something to tell him. He walked onto the front porch, where LaRoche stood.

It was an overcast evening, neither moon nor stars, and so solid darkness surrounded them. Danforth could barely make out LaRoche’s features, barely tell that another body stood near his, save for the labored sound of LaRoche’s breath and the liquor he smelled on it.

“Maybe I’m getting old,” LaRoche said in a voice that was hardly above a whisper. “Maybe I’m seeing things.”

“What things?” Danforth asked.

“Men,” LaRoche said. “Never the same ones.”

“Are you telling me that you’re being followed?” Danforth asked.

LaRoche shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Have you told anyone else about this?” Danforth asked.

LaRoche shook his head.

“I’ll speak to Clayton,” Danforth assured him.

“Good,” LaRoche said. “Maybe you take Anna somewhere else. Someplace so I don’t know where she is.” He paused, started to continue, then hesitated, making Danforth sense that he was about to hear a secret LaRoche had revealed to very few. “It’s easy to break a man.” For a time, he didn’t speak. When at last he did, the words fell like toppling headstones. “All gone, Kruševo.”

Kruševo, Danforth thought, and it all suddenly came clear. The ten-day republic.

One of Danforth’s Far East business associates had been in Macedonia when the Kruševo rebellion began, and he had more than once related the horrors of its suppression, Turkish atrocities piled one upon the other like bodies in a lorry. They’d razed towns and farms, cut a blood-soaked swath of terror through the region and put thousands to flight, a pitiable throng, bitter and defeated, doomed to be forever homeless, and no doubt among whose dispirited number had been LaRoche himself.

“A man will break under the lash,” LaRoche murmured softly, and now Danforth was unsure of whether LaRoche had suffered the outrages of Kruševo or inflicted them.

Danforth started to speak, but LaRoche suddenly whirled around and grabbed his arm in a tight grip. “Clayton should hide Anna,” he said emphatically “He should hide her soon.” Even in the darkness, LaRoche’s eyes glittered with the cold sparkle of broken glass. “And tell no one where she is.”

Danforth said nothing. LaRoche’s voice, drunken though it was, had been so fierce and heartrending that in the wake of his words, as the two men lingered in the night, silent and enclosed, he felt himself more adrift than ever in this new, darker world where nothing seemed entirely within anyone’s control.

~ * ~