The Quest for Anna Klein

Chekov’s Hammer

~ * ~

Century Club, New York City, 2001

“It was a moment of knight-errantry I suppose,” Danforth said in a voice that was darkly nostalgic, like that of a man recalling a struggle he had almost won. “And it was probably the origin of my obsession.”

Knight-errantry? Obsession?

This was the stuff of romantic fiction, I thought, though oddly so, part King Arthur’s Round Table, part Sigmund Freud’s couch.

Then suddenly I recalled a line I’d read as an undergraduate. It had been attributed to Kenneth Patchen, a Greenwich Village poet: Boxers punch harder when women are around. If this was what Danforth’s story reduced to, his need to win the hand of a mysterious woman, then surely I was wasting my time. I glanced outside. The snow was deepening. I’d flown in last night; the hotel room was booked through tomorrow, but I’d decided to leave right after today’s interview. I hadn’t checked out yet, though, which was fortunate, since there would probably not be a plane this evening. Still, no doubt the Acela train would be running. If Danforth’s tale proved increasingly prosaic, I could cut the interview short and be snugly back in my Arlington apartment by nine o’clock.

“The whole thing was staged, that’s what you’re saying?” I asked in order to return Danforth to the subject at hand.

“Yes,” Danforth answered. “Bannion had insisted on it, Clayton told me later. To protect Anna. If I passed the test, I would go with her to France.”

“Did Anna know beforehand that you were going to be . . . tested?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Danforth answered. “I never asked her.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Probably because I didn’t want to know,” Danforth answered frankly. “To think that she might have been sitting in the room next door, listening to my screams. That would not have been a good thing.”

“Why not?”

“Because it would have suggested that Anna was a woman without limits,” Danforth said, “and wisdom is about proportion, Paul, about having a sense of proportion.”

This seemed little more than a weary restatement of the golden mean, and so I glanced down at my notes, saw a gap, and sought to fill it.

“How did Anna come to the Project, by the way?” I asked. “It’s not clear who recruited her.”

“Bannion recruited her,” Danforth answered. “At first I thought she might have been a member of one of his Communist cells. But it turns out he’d known her almost from the time she’d first come to America. He’d been a Shabbos goy, working at one of the synagogues on the Lower East Side. Anna was learning Hebrew from a rabbi there. Later, Bannion had gone off to do Party work, and after that to Spain. He’d come back quite disillusioned with Communism, Anna told me, but looking for a way to fight Fascism.”

“So he was one of those men who have to have causes,” I said in a worldly tone.

Danforth nodded slowly. “I’ve learned that ideology is a room without windows, Paul,” he said. “You can only see what’s already inside it.” He shrugged. “It’s the same with a political cause. Once you commit yourself to it, it’s hard to find limits, hard to say, ‘This I will not do, even for my cause.’ The Project was like that, something that found its way into your blood.”

“So at this point, were you told what the Project was?” I asked.

“Yes,” Danforth said. “It had to do with making contact with a large group of displaced Spaniards who’d fled to France toward the end of the Spanish civil war. The French had interned them in quite a few scattered camps. The thinking was that these Spaniards who’d fought against Franco and retreated into France could now be organized and equipped to fight against the Germans in the event that France was invaded.”

“To field an army,” I said. “That’s quite ambitious.”

“Very, yes,” Danforth answered. “Ambitious enough to accomplish something, which was the goal, after all. For that reason, I think you’ll agree that it was an idea worth exploring.”

“I suppose so.”

“And protecting.”

I nodded.

“Even to the point of romantic deception,” Danforth added. “Bitter though that may be.”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean by ‘romantic deception,”‘ I told him,

“No, of course not,” Danforth said. He thought a moment, then asked, “Do you know The Maltese Falcon?”

“The old movie, with Humphrey Bogart.”

“I was thinking of the book,” Danforth said. “But, yes, the same story. Except that in the book things go a little differently, so that when Sam Spade discovers that Brigid O’Shaughnessy pretended to love him but never did, he strips her naked. He does this literally, Paul. And then —at least metaphorically — he sends her to her death.”

I sensed a curious turn in Danforth’s story, a tingling that suggested the plot, as they say, had thickened.

“And such a person would be worthy of death, don’t you think?” Danforth asked, his voice now very cold and hard. “A traitor?”