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The Quest for Anna Klein
Thomas H. Cook
PART 1
The Slenderness of Bones
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Century Club, New York City, 2001
The question was never whether she would live or die, for that had been decided long ago.
Danforth had said this flatly at one point deep in our conversation, a conclusion he’d evidently come to by way of a painful journey.
It had taken time for him to reach this particular remark. As I’d learned by then, he was a man who kept to his own measured pace. After our initial greeting, for example, he’d taken an agonizingly slow sip from his scotch and offered a quiet, grand-fatherly smile. “People in their clubs,” he said softly. “Isn’t that how Fitzgerald put it? People in their clubs who set down their drinks and recalled their old best dreams. I must seem that way to you. An old man with a head full of woolly memories.” His smile was like an arrow launched from a great distance. “But even old men can be dangerous.”
I’d come to New York from Washington, traveled from one stricken city to another, it seemed, a novice member of the think tank that had recently hired me. My older colleagues had manned the desks of what had once been called Soviet Studies. They’d been very assiduous in these studies. There’d hardly been a ruble spent on missiles or manure that they hadn’t recorded and scrutinized. But for all that, not one of them had foreseen the abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union, how it would simply dissolve into the liquefying fat of its own simmering corruption. That stunning failure in forecasting had shaken their confidence to the core and sent them scrambling for an explanation. They’d still been searching for it years later when the attack had come even more staggeringly out of nowhere. That had been a far graver failure to understand the enemy at our gates, and it had sharply, and quite conveniently for me, changed their focus. Now I, the youngest of their number, their latest hire, had been dispatched to interview Thomas Jefferson Danforth, a man I’d never heard of but who’d written to tell me that he had “experience” that might prove useful, as he’d put it, to “policymakers” such as myself, “especially now.” The interview was not a prospect I relished, and I knew it to be the sort of task doled out to freshman colleagues more or less as a training exercise, but it was better than standing guard at the copying machine or fetching great stacks of research materials from the bowels of various government agencies.
“I remember that line of Fitzgerald’s,” I told Danforth, just to let him know that, although a mere wisp of a boy by his lights, I was well educated, perhaps even a tad worldly. “It was about Lindbergh. How ‘people set down their glasses in country clubs,’ struck by what he’d done.”
“A solo flight across the Atlantic that reminded them of what they’d once been or had hoped to be,” Danforth added. Now his smile suddenly seemed deeply weighted, like a bet against the odds. “Youth is a country with closed borders,” he said. “All that’s valuable must be smuggled in.”
I assumed this remark was rhetorical and found it somewhat condescending, but our conversation had just begun and so I let it pass.
Danforth winced as he shifted in his chair. “Old bones,” he explained. “So, what is your mission, Mr. Crane? The grand one, I mean.”
“Our country’s good,” I answered. “Is that grand enough?”
What remained of Danforth’s smile vanished. “I was young like you.” His voice was even, his tone cautionary, as if he regarded my youth as an animal that could easily turn on me. “Clever and self-confident. It was a very good feeling, as I recall.”
He’d been described to me as reticent, distant, somber, and his experience in what my senior associates still called “the great game” had been brief and long ago. For these reasons, I’d concluded that in all likelihood he could offer little of value to the present situation. But in the still-settling dust of the Towers’ collapse, every corner was being searched, every source, no matter how remote and seemingly irrelevant, gleaned for information. The gyroscope at the center of our expertise had been struck by those planes — so the thinking went — and it had wobbled, and now all its movements had to be recalibrated.
And so, after reading Danforth’s letter, Dr. Carlson had decided that Danforth might have something to add to our intelligence. He’d told me that Danforth did not give interviews, so it was quite surprising that I’d been singled out for this audience.
“Have you ever met the old buzzard?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Then why you, Paul?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “Maybe he saw that little piece I wrote in Policy Options.”
“Oh, well,” Dr. Carlson said. “At least you’ll get to see the Century Club.”
Which was indeed something of a treat, I had to admit, as I glanced about the room in which Danforth and I now faced each other, its bookshelves lined with works written by the club’s members.
“A very impressive place,” I said.
“If one is easily impressed,” Danforth replied with a slight smile. “I read your article on the current crisis. You seem very certain, I must say, in regard to what should be done.”
I shrugged. “It’s not really a very prestigious publication,” I told him with slightly feigned modesty. “More of an opinion sampler where graduate students attempt to get noticed. Which I did, evidently. By you.”
“Your father was a professor of foreign affairs,” Danforth said.
My father’s position at a rather modest little college had been mentioned in the brief biography that accompanied my article, so I wasn’t surprised that Danforth was aware of it. Still, there was an air of clandestine knowledge in his tone; he seemed to carry, almost like a mark upon his brow, the faded brand of a spy.
“Yes, he was,” I told him. “He never made policy, of course . . .”
“Which is clearly what you hope to do?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm,” Danforth said. He drew a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and read. “‘Our response should flow from passion as much as policy, and should bear with it a hint of the paranoid.’” He looked at me quite seriously. “So there should be no irrationality gap between ourselves and our enemies.”
His remark held no mockery, it seemed to me; Danforth truly appeared to be considering what I’d written.
“My point is that now is not a time for half measures,” I replied. “Not in the face of these medievalists.”
“The target is all,” Danforth said. “Picking it and destroying it. Which is where true intelligence comes in.”
Comfortably seated amid the old-fashioned opulence of the Century Club, Danforth looked very much the worldly intelligence officer who’d once sipped cognac and smoked cigars with the sort of characters one might find in Graham Greene or Somerset Maugham. His suit had passed its prime, and his tie was unstylishly wide, but I could imagine him as a figure from a bygone age, a handsome young man in a white dinner jacket, lounging on some tropical veranda, watching a steamer move out of the harbor. There would be riotously colored birds in the long green fronds of the nearby trees, and on that ship, a woman in a satin dress would be standing with a champagne glass in her long white fingers, lifting it to him silently, Adieu, mon amour. He was part of a vanished time, I thought, a lost world, and because of that, my current mission seemed even more a matter of giving the new boy something to do.