Quest for Anna Klein, The

by Cook, Thomas H

  He walked back toward a table he’d selected almost the instant he’d come into the bar, in much the same way a hunted man might locate the nearest exit. He knew that there was something primitive in this, something not altogether rational, something he thought might serve a soldier better than an importer. For that reason, he’d found a secret anticipation in the rattling rumors of European war, even an obscene but reflex-ive hope that they might prove true. It was the hope of a young man, he knew, and a foolish one at that. The two uncles buried in the American cemetery at Romagne remindent him that war could prove fatal, so any time he allowed himself to anticipate it with anything but dread, he also made himself recall the long rows of white crosses he’d seen in that sweeping burial ground. But even in this memory, a glimmer of war’s romance managed to peek through: he also recalled the visitors’ book at Romagne, how in so many distinctly different hands, the French had written the simple, elegant merci.

  A barmaid swam out of the gloom a few minutes after he took his seat, a woman clearly recruited from the kitchen staff. The greasy apron proved that, along with the damp washcloth that hung around her neck.

  “What can I get you?” she asked.

  The Old Town Bar was no place for a dry martini.

  “Scotch,” Danforth said. “Straight up.”

  While he waited, Danforth went over the day’s usual business problems: delays in shipments, boats waylaid by storms, and always, always, overland disruptions in Manchuria. In the Orient, the actual nature of the obstacle was rarely clear, but then what did it matter if a mountain pass was blocked by a blizzard or by the thievish whim of some local warlord? In the importing business, his father had taught him, one learned to accept the inscrutable. There was no other enterprise on earth, according to the elder Danforth, that more fully and continually confronted hazard: shipments inundated by swollen rivers or buried in avalanches, trains seized by starving mobs or expropriated by revolutionaries, and if the merchandise did not fall victim to any of these, then it was held captive by greedy functionaries intent on expanding bribery’s already more than generous largesse. Importation operated like the universe, as Danforth had come to see it: irrationally and violently, with something vaguely criminal at its core.

  The bar door burst open and Clayton came through it, stopped, stomped the snow from his shoes, then peered about expectantly.

  Danforth lifted his hand.

  Clayton nodded briskly and headed toward him, rubbing his glasses with a white handkerchief. He’d returned them to his face by the time he reached the table.

  “It’s like the Blizzard of Eighty-three out there,” he said.

  Clayton worked as a photography archivist for the library on Forty-second Street, a job secured for him, no doubt, by the large annual contribution his family made to the library. He specialized in New York City history; his head was filled with black-and-white images of its storied past. Danforth knew with certainty that at the mention of the 1883 blizzard, Clayton’s mind had instantly offered up striking pictures of that peculiar disaster: a city locked in great drifts of ghostly pale; horses buried in harness, their heads protruding from white mounds, stiff as bookends.

  “Have you been here long?” Clayton asked.

  “Only a few minutes.”

  He pulled off his coat and draped it over an empty chair but left his red scarf around his neck and shoulders. “This place seems quite cozy, don’t you think?”

  The barmaid lumbered over. Clayton ordered a vodka tonic with lime.

  “So,” he said once it was just the two of them again, “how are things in imports?”

  “A family business is a family business,” Danforth answered. “I liked the training better than the mission.”

  “Imagine how bored you’ll be at thirty,” Clayton said with a quick smile.

  Both of the drinks came a moment later. They lifted them but toasted nothing.

  Clayton put down his glass firmly. “What’s the most frightened you’ve ever been, Tom?”

  It was an odd question, Danforth thought, and yet he instantly recalled the incident quite vividly.

  “I was seven years old,” he answered. “My father and I were in Romania. The train suddenly stopped very hard, so you knew the brakeman had seen something unexpected up ahead. In this case it was a man hanging from a cross.”

  Clayton’s gaze intensified. “A cross?”

  “Yes,” Danforth answered. “As in Calvary. It had been raised beside the tracks at the end of a mountain pass, and several men with rifles were standing on the railroad bed. A bandit with a dagger ordered us out of the train to see it. There was never a word after that. Other bandits came out of the woods and simply walked among the passengers, taking whatever they liked. They nodded toward your pockets and you emptied them. They nodded toward your watch and you gave it to them. I noticed that my father’s fingers were trembling. I’d never seen him frightened, and I said to myself, ‘Well, I guess you don’t fool around with men who nail other men to crosses.’”

  “That’s quite an experience,” Clayton said.

  Danforth recalled the flat look in the bandits’ eyes, how lightless they’d been, utterly without sparkle. “Dead souls are very scary, Robert.”

  “Dead souls,” Clayton repeated. He was silent for a moment, then his gaze took on an unexpected urgency. “All your travels, the nature of your business, your command of several languages. It struck me last night at Delmonico’s that you’d be the perfect man for a secret mission.”

  “A secret mission; I can see it now,” Danforth said with a laugh. “Sipping a kümmel at the Hermitage. Meeting shadowy figures on a park bench in Vienna. Learning how to make invisible ink.”

  “That would be equal parts baking soda and water,” Clayton said matter-of-factly. “Write with a toothpick on white paper. Then hold the paper to a heat source, and your message will appear in brown.”

  “You’re kidding me,” Danforth said.

  “Not at all,” Clayton said quite gravely. He took a sip from his drink. “So now you know how to make invisible ink, Tom.”

  Danforth waved his hand dismissively. “Forgive me, Robert, but this all sounds like play-acting.”

  “Believe me, it’s more serious than that,” Clayton said solemnly. “It might even have an influence on history.”

  “An influence on history?” Danforth asked. “That’s an ambitious project, even for you.”

  “Project,” Clayton said. “That’s a good word for it. We’ll call it that from now on. The Project.” He glanced at his watch. “Seven forty-five,” he said with a quick smile. “Our lives pass so quickly, don’t they, Tom?”

  Danforth gave no response to this deadly familiar philosophical aside and instead took a sip of his drink.

  At the front of the bar, a few more customers came in: a couple of men who were obviously regulars, and a bedraggled young woman who seemed unsure if she was in the right place.

  “We have so little time to make lasting memories,” Clayton added.

  Danforth watched as the men huddled up to the bar and left the woman to stand alone, looking frazzled and forlorn, like an animal cut from the herd because it was sick or wounded. In the woman’s case, it seemed due to some mental confusion or dis-orientation. She stared about almost vacantly, her gaze wandering the room in uncertain fits and starts, as if she were following the flight of an invisible butterfly.

  There was something poignant in the scene, Danforth thought. “We’re like animals, really,” he said, almost to himself.

  “Animals?” Clayton asked. “In what way?”

  The woman now seemed to be overtaken by the throes of a manic seizure, her movements very quick and contorted. A few people at the bar had begun to watch her. Some were grinning in a cruel way that completely undercut the great Communist romance; these noble workers were no more generous to this fellow lost soul than they would be to one another when the wolf was at the door.

  “In the way we have no mercy
for the weak,” Danforth said as he watched the scene play out at the front of the bar.

  Clayton laughed. “You’re a sentimentalist, Tom. What the Irish call a harp.”

  “Maybe I am,” Danforth admitted.

  The people at the bar were now entirely taken up in cruel amusement, watching with jagged smiles as the woman pulled off her wool cap, dropped it, picked it up, worked to find a place for it, found that place in the pocket of her coat. Her every movement betrayed her solitary vagabondage, how in this teeming city, she was wandering alone.

  “Maybe I am,” Danforth repeated.

  By the time Clayton turned around to face her, the woman had unwound a ragged scarf from her neck and was tromping back toward the rear of the bar.

  “The city is full of nuts,” Clayton said. He appeared mildly annoyed that Danforth continued to be distracted by the woman. “If she comes this way, just give her a few coins.” He drew a pack of cigarettes from his jacket and thumped one out. “They’re everywhere now,” he added irritably. “These goddamn nuts.”

  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 to 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 su
icide.”

  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 traffi c 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?”