“Do you have a passport?” he asked.
“No.”
“You’ll need to get one.” His smile was coolly professional, as he thought it should be. “If you get the job, of course.” He glanced at her resume. “I suppose that will be all for now.”
With that, she left the office, but something of her lingered through the day, an awareness of her that surprised Danforth as he went about the usual business routines. From time to time, he looked up from his desk at the chair she’d sat in during their brief meeting, and strangely, its emptiness created a hunger to see her again. It was a feeling he found curiously new and faintly alarming, like the first sensation of a narcotic one knew one must henceforth avoid.
At six he packed his briefcase with the evening’s work and stepped out of his office.
Mrs. O’Rourke, his secretary, was sitting at her desk. She handed Danforth a small envelope. “This came by messenger.”
Once in the elevator, Danforth opened the envelope and read the note:
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.
“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
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.
