Quest for Anna Klein, The

by Thomas H. Cook

  As he would remind himself down all the many years to come, he had not been able to determine at that moment whether she was obeying an order or issuing it. He could only see her steeliness, and so he stared at her brokenly, still trembling with fear and rocked by the eddies of his own retreating pain, yet determined to steel himself against whatever might befall him in some future interrogation. Next time, he would keep faith with Anna no matter what, he told himself, even to the point of a spoon.

  PART III

  Chekhov’s Hammer

  Century Club, New York City, 2001

  “It was a moment of knight-errantry, I suppose,” Danforth said in a voice that was darkly nostalgic, like that of a man recalling a struggle he had almost won. “And it was probably the origin of my obsession.”

  Knight-errantry? Obsession?

  This was the stuff of romantic fiction, I thought, though oddly so, part King Arthur’s Round Table, part Sigmund Freud’s couch.

  Then suddenly I recalled a line I’d read as an undergraduate. It had been attributed to Kenneth Patchen, a Greenwich Village poet: Boxers punch harder when women are around. If this was what Danforth’s story reduced to, his need to win the hand of a mysterious woman, then surely I was wasting my time. I glanced outside. The snow was deepening. I’d flown in last night; the hotel room was booked through tomorrow, but I’d decided to leave right after today’s interview. I hadn’t checked out yet, though, which was fortunate, since there would probably not be a plane this evening. Still, no doubt the Acela train would be running. If Danforth’s tale proved increasingly prosaic, I could cut the interview short and be snugly back in my Arlington apartment by nine o’clock.

  “The whole thing was staged, that’s what you’re saying?” I asked in order to return Danforth to the subject at hand.

  “Yes,” Danforth answered. “Bannion had insisted on it, Clayton told me later. To protect Anna. If I passed the test, I would go with her to France.”

  “Did Anna know beforehand that you were going to be . . . tested?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Danforth answered. “I never asked her.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Probably because I didn’t want to know,” Danforth answered frankly. “To think that she might have been sitting in the room next door, listening to my screams. That would not have been a good thing.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it would have suggested that Anna was a woman without limits,” Danforth said, “and wisdom is about proportion, Paul, about having a sense of proportion.”

  This seemed little more than a weary restatement of the golden mean, and so I glanced down at my notes, saw a gap, and sought to fill it.

  “How did Anna come to the Project, by the way?” I asked. “It’s not clear who recruited her.”

  “Bannion recruited her,” Danforth answered. “At first I thought she might have been a member of one of his Communist cells. But it turns out he’d known her almost from the time she’d first come to America. He’d been a Shabbos goy, working at one of the synagogues on the Lower East Side. Anna was learning Hebrew from a rabbi there. Later, Bannion had gone off to do Party work, and after that to Spain. He’d come back quite disillusioned with Communism, Anna told me, but looking for a way to fight Fascism.”

  “So he was one of those men who have to have causes,” I said in a worldly tone.

  Danforth nodded slowly. “I’ve learned that ideology is a room without windows, Paul,” he said. “You can only see what’s already inside it.” He shrugged. “It’s the same with a political cause. Once you commit yourself to it, it’s hard to find limits, hard to say, ‘This I will not do, even for my cause.’ The Project was like that, something that found its way into your blood.”

  “So at this point, were you told what the Project was?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Danforth said. “It had to do with making contact with a large group of displaced Spaniards who’d fled to France toward the end of the Spanish civil war. The French had interned them in quite a few scattered camps. The thinking was that these Spaniards who’d fought against Franco and retreated into France could now be organized and equipped to fight against the Germans in the event that France was invaded.”

  “To field an army,” I said. “That’s quite ambitious.”

  “Very, yes,” Danforth answered. “Ambitious enough to accomplish something, which was the goal, after all. For that reason, I think you’ll agree that it was an idea worth exploring.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “And protecting.”

  I nodded.

  “Even to the point of romantic deception,” Danforth added. “Bitter though that may be.”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean by ‘romantic deception,’” I told him,

  “No, of course not,” Danforth said. He thought a moment, then asked, “Do you know The Maltese Falcon?”

  “The old movie, with Humphrey Bogart.”

  “I was thinking of the book,” Danforth said. “But, yes, the same story. Except that in the book things go a little differently, so that when Sam Spade discovers that Brigid O’Shaughnessy pretended to love him but never did, he strips her naked. He does this literally, Paul. And then — at least metaphorically — he sends her to her death.”

  I sensed a curious turn in Danforth’s story, a tingling that suggested the plot, as they say, had thickened.

  “And such a person would be worthy of death, don’t you think?” Danforth asked, his voice now very cold and hard. “A traitor?”

  “Yes,” I said firmly.

  “Even if you loved this traitor, as I’m sure you’ll agree,” Danforth added. “And even if, perhaps, an innocent person was also put in danger.” He leaned forward slightly. “Because what secures man’s moral life, Paul, is accountability. And accountability is based on punishment, the more sure and certain, the better.” Now he sat back. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  He was silent for a moment, his gaze very steadily upon me, then he said, “Later, I came to wonder just how many parts Anna had acted. She once told me that she’d worked for a few weeks at a French construction firm on Vandam Street, translating correspondence. It turns out that this was true. I know because I checked the records.”

  Checked the records? So Danforth had carried out some sort of investigation of Anna, I thought, one he’d conducted after the war. Why, I wondered, had he done that?

  But before I could ask him directly, Danforth posed a question of his own.

  “Tell me, Paul, have you seen much of the world?”

  “Some,” I answered.

  “Asia? Africa?”

  “No.”

  “The Middle East?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not a world traveler, if that’s your point,” I said a little sharply.

  A vague dreaminess came over him. “The Seto Sea,” he said. “I went there three years ago. They have a rope way, a cable car that takes you up Mount Misen.” Briefly, he seemed captured by that moment in his past. Then quite abruptly, he returned to the present, though not directly to his tale.

  “Did you know that Kyoto was at the top of the list of cities marked for the first atomic bomb?” he asked.

  “No,” I confessed.

  “General Groves wanted Kyoto bombed first,” Danforth told me. “It was the ancient Japanese capital, so its destruction would devastate Japanese morale, he said. It was also surrounded by mountains that would concentrate the blast.” He drained the last of the port. “But Secretary of War Stimson scratched Kyoto off the list. He’d been there, you see. Twice, actually. Once on his honeymoon.” He looked at me significantly. “It’s hard to destroy something you have reason to love.” His smile struck me as a direct warning. “Travel removes places from the target list, Paul. In a way, it removed Paris. A German general refused to destroy it and lied to Hitler when he was asked if Paris was burning.”

  “Yes,” I said, somewhat r
elieved that I was familiar with this story. “I read about that.”

  “That general made a wise choice,” Danforth said. “Paris is a beautiful city. Anna and I arrived there the third week in May.”

  Ah, I thought, he has, according to his style, wound back to his narrative.

  “I’d rented two apartments on the Left Bank, just off Saint-Germain-des-Prés,” Danforth said.

  “Two apartments?” I asked.

  “You mean, did we sleep together?” Danforth asked. “Is that what you want to know, Paul? Did Anna and I have fantastic sex then enjoy a petit déjeuner on a flower-filled terrace with the towers of Notre Dame in the distance?”

  I had to admit that his earlier mention of the “erotics of intrigue” had rather surreptitiously asserted itself.

  “Something like that,” I said, a little embarrassed that I had given this away so blatantly.

  Danforth straightened one sleeve of his jacket. “No, we were not lovers.”

  What they were, or later became, sparkled briefly in his eyes, then vanished like a candle tossed down a well.

  “But Paris was beautiful, a city of lights,” Danforth added. “And there was the touch of intrigue I felt every time Anna presented her passport, the very American name she’d chosen: she was now Anna Collier. Everything gave off a certain dramatic charge and made my little world a tad brighter.” He drew in a breath that was quick and light, yet with something heavy at its center. “Even in those dark days.”

  Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, France, 1939

  They sat down a little distance from the L’Orangerie, both tired from the day’s long walk. During the last few hours, they’d reconnoitered the city, an expedition that had taken them from Passy, where Balzac had lived his extravagant life, to the groves of Pè-reLachaise, where that life had come to rest. They’d wandered the streets of Pigalle and mounted the stairs to Sacré Coeur. In that way, street by street, Paris had revealed itself as all great cities do, like an exotic dancer shedding one veil at a time.

  Anna looked out over the park, gazing first at a group of children in their school uniforms, then at an old man in a black beret, and finally at a young couple strolling arm in arm down one of the neatly manicured paths.

  “Our city of intrigue,” Danforth said lightly.

  In later years, he would consider how odd it was that he was there, how little he’d known, and he’d see this as emblematic of the decision to break free from the moorings of his former life. Despite the peril that followed, when he recalled sitting with Anna in the Jardin des Tuileries that evening, he regretted nothing about his decision to accompany her, not the complex business matters he’d abruptly left in the care of others, or even the consternation his sudden departure from New York had caused his father. The only thing that mattered to him was that he’d cast all that aside and embarked on a course whose outcome he could not foresee, a journey — the first of his life — that had no clear destination. At that moment, as he would often in the future recall, he’d felt only the sense that what he’d done was right and that to have done anything else would have been wrong.

  And he’d been busy, after all. His little act of subterfuge required him to perform as an importer, and so, upon arriving in Paris, he’d met with several of his Parisian business associates, looked at the merchandise in their shops and small warehouses, with Anna always at his side, taking notes, perfect in her role as his dutiful assistant, her French flawless. By then she’d learned quite a bit about antiques and art and could tell the genuine from the fake; from time to time she even felt confident enough to suggest a price or reject one.

  Toward evening they found themselves at the Place de Grève, and Danforth suddenly thought of the execution of Damiens, the unbearable torments he had suffered on this very spot. At that thought Danforth returned to his ordeal in the Connecticut warehouse, and from that point suddenly imagined Anna in the custody of such men, the insult and humiliation they would add to whatever tortures they administered, because it had always been so with torturing women. It was not a subject he could bring up, however; it would serve no purpose, and so he simply guided their walk toward the banks of the Seine, where they strolled slowly and for the most part silently as the river’s boats and barges cruised by.

  “It all seems like the quiet before the storm, doesn’t it?” he said finally.

  Anna nodded. “Unless the storm can be stopped.”

  The remark struck Danforth as odd since, as he’d learned by then, the Project was not concerned with preventing the coming war. The goal was to make sure that any German advance would encounter opposition from an unexpected quarter, an undertaking far more extensive than he’d imagined and whose feasibility it was Anna’s — and now his — mission to explore.

  He said nothing of this, however, so they walked on in silence until they reached a large hall where a crowd had gathered.

  “It’s Daladier,” Anna said.

  In the years after the war, as one by one the tiny lights went on in his brain, Danforth would try to recall the precise details of what followed next: the look in Anna’s eyes as she watched the prime minister of France move through the crowd; the way the people pressed in toward him; the chaotic nature of that crowd, the women bearing flowers, the tradesmen with packages, and here and there a lone man with his hands sunk deep into the pockets of his trousers or his jacket or, as Danforth noted in one case, tucked beneath a bloodstained apron.

  “He seems quite fearless,” Anna said, her gaze intense as she studied the way Daladier moved through the crowd, a short, stocky man, looking very much like what he was called: the bull of Vaucluse.

  “Heads of state have to be fearless these days,” Danforth said.

  Daladier disappeared into a building, and the crowd began to disperse. Anna, however, remained in place, seemingly still captivated by the scene that had just played out before her: a public figure publicly adored, confident in the adulation of the crowd through which he’d moved.

  Was that the moment, Danforth asked himself on the countless occasions when he replayed this scene, when Anna had first thought of a quite different plot, one considerably more dangerous? Or had the Project never been anything more than a smoke screen to her, its only goal to conceal the real plot behind it? Had it always been her plan that they would appear as innocents, amateurs, Americans on a fool’s errand? Years later, as he combed through everything from government records to spy fiction, Danforth would continually wonder if he had from the very beginning been a dupe, manipulated at every turn, little more than a string she’d artfully wound around her finger.

  But on that evening, Danforth could think only of Anna’s mood and the silence that once again enveloped her as they headed home and that was not broken until they reached her door, where, to their surprise, they found a young man waiting for them.

  “I am Christophe,” he said.

  The man who spoke was only a few years older than they, and in Danforth’s view, he hardly looked the part of a secret agent. His hair was black, and he wore spectacles, but his ragged clothes set him apart and gave him the look of an impoverished student.

  “My English is very good,” Christophe assured them. “I lived in America for some years.” He nodded down the boulevard. “Please, come. We can talk in my room.”

  The walk to Christophe’s room was longer than Danforth had expected, and it ended on a block considerably seedier than any he had yet visited. The front door creaked loudly as Christophe opened it and motioned them into the dank, smelly interior of the building.

  “Just up the stairs,” Christophe said.

  His room was on the third floor, and it was a true garret, crowded with books and magazines that lay in great stacks all around the place. A musty odor came from these papers that Danforth recognized as the same one that came from Christophe’s jacket, and probably his shirt and socks and hair.

  “Would you like a glass of wine?” Christophe asked.

  Danforth said that he wo
uld, but Anna declined, as always, a dedication to sobriety he took to be emblematic of her seriousness, though later he would wonder if this too had only been a show.

  Christophe produced a jug of red wine, and after pouring it, lifted his glass, and spoke in Spanish. “Hasta la victoria,” he said.

  “Victory over what?” Anna asked.

  “Over the Germans,” Christophe answered.

  “We’re not at war with Germany yet,” she reminded him.

  “I am,” Christophe said. He turned to Danforth. “I have been since Guernica.”

  Christophe had met Bannion when they’d been in the International Brigades, a group of young men from all over the world who’d rallied to the anti-Fascist cause, shipped out to Spain, fought bravely but hopelessly, and then returned to their native lands.

  “They sang an American song,” Christophe told them cheerfully. “‘Red River Valley.’ All the time, they sang it.”

  Christophe had the starry-eyed look of an idealist, Danforth thought. There was a boundless naiveté in the way he went on to praise his fellow brigadiers, a blindness to human nature he suspected most idealists shared since, in order to believe such ideals, they first had to believe that all men were as innocent as they.

  “As you know, our hope is to use the great number of Spanish in France now,” Christophe said at the conclusion of his brief paean to his own lost cause. “These are republican soldiers who escaped over the Pyrenees before Spain fell to Franco. The French have put them in what they call transit camps. Le Vernet d’Ariege, Saint-Cyprien, Barcares, Argeles, Gurs.” He looked suddenly toward Anna. “These men are seasoned fighters. And they know that if the Germans overrun France, they will all be killed or sent back to Spain.” His eyes did not leave Anna’s. “Escape is not diffi cult. At Gurs, for example, the barbed wire is only two feet high, and there are no guardhouses.”

  None of this was news to Danforth, as he’d spent the last of his time in New York being filled in on the Project by Clayton and Bannion. Even so, he listened intently as Christophe talked about how many displaced Spaniards were currently in France, almost a quarter million. They had proven their courage, and their hatred of the Germans was intense. They were Spaniards, he said, and therefore they were brave. Surely arrangements could be made to arm and supply them if war broke out between Germany and France.