The Quest for Anna Klein

He paused and looked toward the window, the snow now falling a little heavier than before. “When is your flight back to Washington, Paul?”

“Not for a few hours,” I answered, though I feared that even this generous stretch of time wouldn’t be enough to finish what was turning into a much more leisurely interview than I’d planned.

“So,” I said crisply. “You were at Gramercy Park again. In a restaurant with your fiancee. You were looking out the window of the restaurant, out into the park, thinking about—”

“Thinking about myself, actually,” Danforth interrupted. He took a sip from his glass. “Have you ever read The Riddle of the Sands?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“I suppose I was a bit like Carruthers in that book,” Danforth told me. “Youth can be a cruel lash, you know. Sometimes a lash you suffer. Sometimes a lash you wield.” He looked for some response to this, but when I gave none, he continued. “Anyway, I called Clayton later that night, after that dinner with Cecilia. I told him that I was interested in the Project. He didn’t seem surprised. But I wasn’t entirely convinced, I told him. I wanted to meet with Lingua. He arranged for us to get together at one of those dimly lit grog houses they still have down on Fourth Avenue.”

“And when you met her,” I asked with a sly smile, “was she ... Mata Hari?”

“She was pretty, if that’s what you mean,” Danforth said with perfect seriousness. “But that wasn’t what I most noticed about her.”

“What did you notice?”

Danforth paused, then said, “How shall I put it?” Once again he appeared to retreat to that earlier time. “That she already seemed to be looking back at life from the bottom of her grave.”

~ * ~

Dugout Bar, New York City, 1939

Danforth arrived first and proceeded to a booth at the far corner of the bar. He’d come to have serious reservations about the meeting, along with even greater ones about getting involved with Clayton’s no-doubt- inflated idea of influencing history. What scheme could possibly do that?

But for all that, he couldn’t deny that he felt a certain anticipation with regard to this meeting; when he saw her come through the front door of the bar, he felt a quickening.

“Hello,” she said when she reached him.

She sat, drew her arms out of her coat, and let it fall behind her back, then she folded her scarf and laid it beside her on the bench, all of this done as if she thought herself alone in the booth. Her gaze was still cast down when she said, “No snow this time.”

There was an olive undertone to her skin that made her look faintly Sicilian; her features were at once delicate and inexpressibly strong, and there was a penetrating sharpness to her gaze.

“My name is Thomas Danforth,” he told her.

“Anna Klein.”

Klein, Danforth thought. It meant “small” in German, and therefore seemed quite appropriate to the woman who sat across from him. He recalled that Clayton had said she was a genius with languages, and he decided to test the waters. “Konnen wir sprechen Deutsch?” he asked.

“Wie sie wunschen.”

For the next few minutes they spoke only German, Danforth’s considerable fluency matched by hers.

“Where did you learn German?” Danforth asked her when he returned to English.

“I pick up languages very easily,” Anna answered without elaboration.

“And you speak French too?” Danforth asked.

“Yes,” Anna said. “Voulez-vous parler en Francais?”

Danforth nodded and they switched to French, and after that to Spanish, and after that to Italian, and in all three cases Anna spoke with a fluency that astonished him.

“How many languages do you speak?” he asked in English.

“Nine,” Anna answered but did not list them.

“You live in the city?”

She nodded crisply. “The Lower East Side.”

Danforth’s father had called her neighborhood “the squalid kingdom of the Jews,” and as she lowered her eyes, Danforth considered the long history of her people’s persecutions: the false accusations made against them — that they poisoned wells and sacrificed Gentile children —the hundreds of sacked and burning villages they’d fled, the wintry forests in which they’d hidden, boiling tree bark for their soup.

The barmaid arrived. Danforth ordered a scotch, but Anna merely waved her hand. “Thank you, nothing for me,” she said.

“Not a drinker?” Danforth asked.

“No,” she said.

“I admire your discipline,” Danforth said, meaning it half as a joke. He shrugged. “I suppose you know that I’ve been asked to provide a place where you can be trained.”

One of her tiny brown hands inched over and covered the other. “Yes,” she answered, then suddenly leaned