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.
