The Quest for Anna Klein

by Thomas H. Cook

  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.

  ~ * ~

  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.”