Winterset, Connecticut, 1939
Danforth had watched during the past few weekends as the cellar of the house was converted into a sinister laboratory. LaRoche had set up tables and covered them with an array of materials. There were scores of glass bottles filled with various powders and liquids. He’d brought in brass scales as well, along with a black marble mortar and pestle. To these he’d added a large collection of items he thought might prove useful: a briefcase with a false bottom, a clock and several wristwatches, samples of European electrical switches, sundry dyes and polishes, and a supply of detonators. Each weekend had brought another lesson, and with each weekend, Anna had grown more adept in the secret arts of sabotage. There’d been more shooting lessons, as well as a great deal of training on the wireless LaRoche had unloaded from the back of his car the last week of February.
With each stage of Anna’s training, LaRoche grew more confident in her abilities, so in the last days of winter, he decided to take the final step.
“Today we’ll make a bomb,” he told Anna on that particular day.
He directed her over to a table on which he’d set various materials.
“This is potassium chlorate,” he said. “You can kill slugs with that, but it’s good for a bomb too.” He pointed to a glass jar filled with a white powder that looked as innocent as confectioners’ sugar. “That’s potassium nitrate. Plenty in fertilizer.” The next exhibit was potassium permanganate, which LaRoche said could be found in a common throat gargle. After that, he picked up a can of what appeared to be ordinary wood stain. “Ferric oxide in this.” The next can was silver paint. “In here you’ve got ground aluminum.” He gave an almost comic shrug. “It’s easy to find stuff for a bomb.”
But it was not enough merely to make a bomb, LaRoche added. For, once it was made, a bomb had to be hidden, and the best way to do this was to disguise it as something else.
“Like this,” he said as he picked up a large lump of coal. “Coal is soft. Very easy to carve out and place a bomb in. There’s coal everywhere in Europe. Big stacks in the basement, right by the boiler. Blow a building sky- high.”
Danforth envisioned the moment when Anna’s new courses of study all abruptly came together in a fiery explosion, a building shuddering somewhere in the heart of Europe, great tongues of flame climbing charred walls and leaping out of shattered windows; Anna would be some hours away at that point, he hoped, perhaps already set up in another town, connecting other fuses to other timers, preparing the next action.
By then he would have settled back into his work at Danforth Imports, he thought, be taking the usual calls, making the usual decisions. He’d be married to Cecilia, settled into the Connecticut house, perhaps with a baby on the way; he’d lounge in a spacious living room reading the latest report on the war in Europe while outside workmen raked fall leaves and plowed under the last of Cecilia’s summer garden.
Danforth couldn’t pinpoint why he found this vision of his future unsettling, though he knew it was more than simply his familiar sense that the most adventurous part of his life had already passed. There was something in the deeply serious nature of Anna’s training, as well as her tirelessness in learning LaRoche’s dark arts, that made him feel small and insignificant. He thought of the Apollonius statue of a pugilist at rest, its battered face and body. Here was a man who’d known the worst of it, who’d been seasoned by grave experience. It was not for nothing, Danforth admitted to himself, that there was no statue of the man who’d held his towel.
This was a troubling thought, and so he was relieved when a ringing phone took him out of it. He turned away from Anna’s training and rushed up the cellar stairs. The phone rested on a stand near the front door.
“Hello,” he said.
“I’ve sent you a client,” Clayton told him. “He’s interested in French Impressionism. He thought you might have contacts in Paris. Be at the town bandstand. Two thirty. He’ll be wearing a light brown jacket. There’ll be a sprig of lavender in its lapel.”
“Lavender?”
Clayton laughed. “You remember those fields, don’t you, Tom?”
“Yes,” he said.
“The bandstand,” Clayton repeated. “Two thirty.”
Danforth returned the phone’s hand set to its cradle, walked out onto the broad front porch, and peered into the forest. Soon the trees would be bristling with green buds, and here and there the first leaves would begin to rustle in the warming air. Where, he wondered, would Anna be when the first flowers bloomed?
Suddenly a noise came from the cellar, a small pop, tightly controlled and heavily muffled, followed by LaRoche’s hard laugh.
Danforth wondered if Anna had laughed along with him, or at least allowed herself a smile, pretending for that brief moment that it was all a game.
The drive to the town park was short, and it was only two o’clock, but Danforth saw no reason to remain at the house. He could take the valley road, the one that wound along a cold blue stream, and approach the town from an unexpected direction, as if his mind were now focused on surprise attack.
On the drive into town, he thought of Anna. They’d had few conversations at work, and all of them had been on business matters. They never met outside business hours, save for the weekends at the house, during which LaRoche had kept her almost entirely to himself, teaching her skills that she then had to demonstrate over and over until the most complex procedures flowed from her with the technical fluidity of an old hand. From time to time the three of them shared meals together, but even then LaRoche focused the conversation on her training, asking her questions, noting her answers, sometimes nodding with satisfaction but otherwise keeping his opinion of her to himself, though Danforth supposed that he was reporting his evaluations to Clayton.
So what did he know about this woman? Danforth asked himself now. Little beyond her steeliness and the fact that she was very bright. At the office, she quickly grasped every element of her training in imports, an intelligence Mrs. O’Rourke had mentioned on several occasions. At Winterset, she’d mastered Morse code and how to operate and repair a wireless with the same effortless alacrity with which she’d learned to fire a pistol and was now learning to make a bomb. He’d already noticed her astonishing ability to slip in and out of identities and to do it so quickly and completely that she seemed briefly to lose herself within them.
But it was her skill at languages that had most impressed Danforth. In conversation with her, he enjoyed the way she could move seamlessly from one to the other. Once she’d told him that it was impossible to know a people if you did not know their language and that if she were granted many lives she would spend them learning yet more
