She faced him. “How about you?” she asked. “Clayton says you went everywhere when you were a child. What was the most beautiful thing you ever saw?”
He told her about Umbria, the village of Assisi, the valley that swept out from the terraces of the town, how beautiful it was, almost unreal.
“When I remember it, I see it more as a painting,” he said at the end of his description.
Anna’s gaze fell toward the swiftly flowing water. “And what’s the most beautiful thing you’ve
It was an odd question, Danforth thought, but he had an answer for it.
“According to my father, it’s the Seto Sea from Mount Misen,” he said. “He saw it, and said it was like a dream.”
“Where is it?” Anna asked.
“Japan,” Danforth answered. “On a little island called Miyajima.”
“Then you must go there,” she said. She glanced toward the house. “I’d better be getting back. LaRoche is waiting.”
They turned and together walked to the house; in the distance, Danforth could see LaRoche standing on the porch, watching them.
“We still have a lot of work,” LaRoche said to Anna when they reached him.
Danforth saw that LaRoche had already been told that Anna was to leave quite soon, though there was no hint that this speeded-up schedule disturbed him. And yet in the following days, small cracks began to appear in LaRoche’s otherwise granite exterior. Danforth noticed it in the way he grew more tender toward Anna during their sessions, and in the way his voice lost its coldness, a change in manner that made him appear almost fatherly in regard to her. He might have been teaching her to ride a bike, Danforth thought, or erect a tent, or any of a hundred other innocuous skills, and he sensed that LaRoche had come to fear for her and so had grown more gentle, as a parent might be more gentle with a child stricken by some dread disease.
~ * ~
Some two weeks later, Danforth and LaRoche sat alone in the front room, enjoying the final cigars of the evening. LaRoche had drunk considerably more than usual, and in that loosened state, he began to talk about the old kingdom of Azerbaijan, where he’d spent some time in the region’s busy trade-route capital of Baku.
“It was all silk and saffron then,” LaRoche said in a nearly musical way that suggested he’d heard these words in a song. His eyes closed with an intoxicated languor. “With towers and minarets, and plenty of oil too. Like Texas.” He leaned back, more relaxed than Danforth had ever seen him. “Everybody well fed. Even the camels.” He laughed. “Especially the camels.” Suddenly his face soured. “Then the czar stuck in his nose. The Azeris and the Armenians started cutting one another’s throats.” He stubbed out his cigar with the violence of one who knew what had been consumed in these ethnic fires. “And after the czar, the Bolsheviks.”
For a moment he seemed lost in a blasted idyll. Briefly, he watched a curl of blue smoke rise from the smoldering cigar. Then he grabbed his scotch and downed it in a single, tortured gulp.
“She’s a good woman, Anna,” he said, then rose to his feet and walked out the door.
Danforth sensed that he was being summoned, that LaRoche had something to tell him. He walked onto the front porch, where LaRoche stood.
It was an overcast evening, neither moon nor stars, and so solid darkness surrounded them. Danforth could barely make out LaRoche’s features, barely tell that another body stood near his, save for the labored sound of LaRoche’s breath and the liquor he smelled on it.
“Maybe I’m getting old,” LaRoche said in a voice that was hardly above a whisper. “Maybe I’m seeing things.”
“What things?” Danforth asked.
“Men,” LaRoche said. “Never the same ones.”
“Are you telling me that you’re being followed?” Danforth asked.
LaRoche shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Have you told anyone else about this?” Danforth asked.
LaRoche shook his head.
“I’ll speak to Clayton,” Danforth assured him.
“Good,” LaRoche said. “Maybe you take Anna somewhere else. Someplace so I don’t know where she is.” He paused, started to continue, then hesitated, making Danforth sense that he was about to hear a secret LaRoche had revealed to very few. “It’s easy to break a man.” For a time, he didn’t speak. When at last he did, the words fell like toppling headstones. “All gone, Krusevo.”
One of Danforth’s Far East business associates had been in Macedonia when the Krusevo rebellion began, and he had more than once related the horrors of its suppression, Turkish atrocities piled one upon the other like bodies in a lorry. They’d razed towns and farms, cut a blood-soaked swath of terror through the region and put thousands to flight, a pitiable throng, bitter and defeated, doomed to be forever homeless, and no doubt among whose dispirited number had been LaRoche himself.
“A man will break under the lash,” LaRoche murmured softly, and now Danforth was unsure of whether LaRoche had suffered the outrages of Krusevo or inflicted them.
Danforth started to speak, but LaRoche suddenly whirled around and grabbed his arm in a tight grip. “Clayton should hide Anna,” he said emphatically “He should hide her soon.” Even in the darkness, LaRoche’s eyes glittered with the cold sparkle of broken glass. “And tell no one where she is.”
