Danforth smiled. “No, my story is about treachery, and the need one can feel to kill a traitor at all costs.” His shrug suggested a coldness I hadn’t seen before. “Killing someone who deserves killing isn’t difficult,” he added. “I could do it without blinking.” His eyes sparkled with what seemed genuine purpose and resolve, and I saw that he meant exactly what he said. Thomas Jefferson Danforth was not a man who would waver in the face of villainy; a traitor in his hands would hang at dawn.
“But as you say, I did see Anna again,” he continued. “After only a couple of weeks, as a matter of fact.” He signaled the waiter and asked that his water goblet be refilled. “I get dry,” he explained. When the waiter had filled his glass and stepped away, he took a slow sip, then returned to the subject at the point we’d broken off. “For as it turned out, Anna’s whereabouts were disclosed to me. Bannion had been called away, Clayton told me, and Anna had to be resupplied.” He allowed himself a small laugh. “That was the word he used.
~ * ~
214 West Ninety-fifth Street, New York City, 1939
He knocked softly, and waited for the door to open.
“Clayton told me you were coming,” Anna said when she opened the door and saw him standing on the tiny landing. “He must trust you.” She glanced at the large bags Danforth held in his arms. “You’d probably like to put those down.” She stepped out of his path. “Come in.”
Danforth walked into the apartment, waited until she closed the door, then followed her into the small kitchen, where he placed the bags on the table by the window.
“Do you think this is all rather extreme,” Anna asked, “this hiding me away?”
“I don’t know,” Danforth admitted. “But you are . . .” He stopped because he felt a vulnerability he didn’t want her to see.
“What?”
“Valuable,” Danforth said, “to the Project.” He shrugged. “Whatever the Project is.”
She began to empty the bags. “How did you explain my leaving work?”
“A sick relative,” Danforth answered. “No one questioned it. Why would they? It’s a common story.” He drew in a quick breath. “Anyway, I’ve brought you two weeks’ worth of provisions.”
“Would you like something to drink?” she asked.
“Coffee,” he said. “If you have it.”
“I have it.”
She sent him to the front room, made the coffee, then joined him. By then, he was sitting in the chair by the window. In the distance, he could see the private school he’d attended as a child, all the boys in suits.
“You have a nice view of the children of the privileged class.” He took a sip from his cup. “You’d probably find their parents rather shallow.”
“No,” Anna said. “Just lucky.”
He wanted to tell her that the privileged were perhaps less lucky than she imagined, that for all their many advantages, they were blocked from certain of life’s core experiences. They could know great grief certainly, and great loss. They could fall victim to a thousand random horrors. But there was a desperate hunger they could not know: the shaping rigor of actual need. He was not at all sure she would understand this, however, and so what came from him was a simple “I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to leave without telling you that. I’m truly sorry.”
“Sorry about what?” Anna asked.
“That business about your being Spanish,” Danforth explained. “You must have found that very insulting.”
She shrugged.
“It would never affect what I feel about you personally,” Danforth said cautiously. “The respect I have for you, for what you’re doing.” He shook his head at the terrible inadequacy of what he was saying, how it seemed he was only digging a deeper grave for himself. “This must all sound so hollow to you.” He placed his cup firmly on the table beside him. “I respect you, that’s what I mean. I truly respect you, and I respect what you’re doing.”
She went back to the kitchen and continued to empty the bags. “You won’t have to come again,” she told him. “I’m leaving for France in a few days.”
“France?” he said, following her into the kitchen.
“Yes.”
“Alone?”
“Of course.”
She continued to busy herself with the bags, but Danforth saw a quick succession of emotions flash in her eyes: first dread, then the immediate suppression of it. In that moment, she seemed carved from will alone. He could not imagine her as a child, or even as a teenager, and he sensed that during her youth, she had been aged by a hardship she had yet to reveal, aged so deeply and thoroughly that her soul was now like one of those ancient coins his father imported, so scuffed and striated no polish could ever make them shine. If she ever kissed a man, he thought, it would be beneath the Bridge of Sighs.
“Well, I should be on my way,” he said, and walked to the door.
“Goodbye,” she said, without offering her hand.
