Danforth said nothing. LaRoche’s voice, drunken though it was, had been so fierce and heartrending that in the wake of his words, as the two men lingered in the night, silent and enclosed, he felt himself more adrift than ever in this new, darker world where nothing seemed entirely within anyone’s control.
~ * ~
Century Club, New York City, 2001
“Perhaps a glass of port, Paul?” Danforth asked. He’d stopped his story abruptly and now daintily touched the corners of his mouth with a napkin. “Or are you afraid it might dull your senses?”
I took this as something of a challenge, one I felt I should meet.
“I think I can handle a port,” I said.
“Good,” Danforth said, his smile quite bright for one who’d just related such an ominous exchange. “A port it shall be.” He summoned the waiter and ordered two glasses of a port I didn’t recognize but, given Danforth’s refinements of taste, assumed was excellent.
“Did Clayton do it?” I asked once the waiter had stepped away.
“Do what?”
“Hide Anna.”
“No, but I did tell him what Bannion had told me at the bandstand and about the conversation with LaRoche, how worried they both had been. But Clayton decided to keep to the same road at the moment. He said Anna would be headed for Europe soon anyway. Until then, he thought her quite safe. Bannion was always overstating things, he said, and LaRoche had grown ridiculously close to Anna and was acting unprofessionally. Besides, he was sure no one had caught on to the Project.”
“That’s all he said?”
“Yes, and he was very convincing,” Danforth said. “Clayton was always very convincing. And what he said was true. You can’t run an operation if you react to every fear.”
In order to keep vaguely to my mission, I asked a technical question. “What should you react to?”
“Doubt,” Danforth said. “If you suddenly feel a quaver of uncertainty, you should look closely at what caused it.”
“Did you feel such a quaver?” I asked. “In terms of the Project, I mean.”
“Yes.”
“Caused by what?”
“Clayton,” Danforth answered. “He was concerned about Anna, her many guises. We were moving closer to the time when she would be sent to Europe, and so he wanted to be sure of her.”
“Sure of her?”
“Who she was,” Danforth said. “Sure of her story. Bannion had given Clayton a full account of himself. All those years he worked for the Communists. Strikes he’d been involved in. Organizing. He’d even gone to fight in the Spanish civil war. After that, his disillusionment. He’d tried to switch sides completely, become an informer against his old comrades. Clayton had checked out every detail of Bannion’s story and knew he’d told him the truth. But Anna’s past was more obscure, so he wanted to make certain of her. It’s the small lies that trip you up, so that was the place to start, he said. Her story about being on Ellis Island, for example, of being held there because she had trachoma. There would be records of something like that. It would be possible to find out of she’d actually been there.”
“Had she?”
“Yes,” Danforth answered. A mood of reflection suddenly settled over him as the waiter brought our port. “I went there many years ago,” he continued when the waiter left. “The hospital had been closed for decades by then, of course. The windows were broken and everything was open to the sea air. The room where she’d once been kept was littered with debris and there were piles of dead leaves in the corners.”
“You went to her actual room?” I asked.
“It was a ward, but yes, I went there,” Danforth answered. “She’d remembered exactly her view from her window. She was able to describe it accurately. It was rather simple to locate the room, a matter of angles.”
Danforth was not one for drawing word pictures, but I suddenly imagined the scene, an old man in a black cashmere overcoat, his hands deep in his pockets, alone in an abandoned hospital room, the ghostly image of a little girl no doubt playing in his mind: the child dressed in a hospital gown, sitting on the side of a bed, her skin olive, and with wildly curly hair.
“Everything is a matter of coordinates, Paul, of intersections,” Danforth continued. “Standing in the room where Anna had been kept on Ellis Island, thinking in that abandoned room of that little girl, knowing all I’d learned by then, it was easy to gather the coordinates of her experience. A person is like a leaf. You pick it up. You hold it up to the sun, note the veins, how they spread out from the central stem, and suddenly, it’s all there. What she was. What she did. Why she did it. Everything.”
He stopped abruptly, and something in his demeanor, a raw sadness, told me simply to wait until he spoke again.
“Anyway,” he said after a long moment. “Clayton wanted me to get to know her a little better and report back to him. And so I decided to see her under less formal circumstances. Not just in the office or at the house, but in a more ... intimate setting.” He took a quick sip of port. “Have you ever heard of Vera Atkins?”
I shook my head.
“During the war she ran a secret operation out of England,” Danforth said. “Women were smuggled into France in order to-”
