This was a troubling thought, and so he was relieved when a ringing phone took him out of it. He turned away from Anna’s training and rushed up the cellar stairs. The phone rested on a stand near the front door.
“Hello,” he said.
“I’ve sent you a client,” Clayton told him. “He’s interested in French Impressionism. He thought you might have contacts in Paris. Be at the town bandstand. Two thirty. He’ll be wearing a light brown jacket. There’ll be a sprig of lavender in its lapel.”
“Lavender?”
Clayton laughed. “You remember those fields, don’t you, Tom?”
“Yes,” he said.
“The bandstand,” Clayton repeated. “Two thirty.”
Danforth returned the phone’s hand set to its cradle, walked out onto the broad front porch, and peered into the forest. Soon the trees would be bristling with green buds, and here and there the first leaves would begin to rustle in the warming air. Where, he wondered, would Anna be when the first flowers bloomed?
Suddenly a noise came from the cellar, a small pop, tightly controlled and heavily muffled, followed by LaRoche’s hard laugh.
Danforth wondered if Anna had laughed along with him, or at least allowed herself a smile, pretending for that brief moment that it was all a game.
The drive to the town park was short, and it was only two o’clock, but Danforth saw no reason to remain at the house. He could take the valley road, the one that wound along a cold blue stream, and approach the town from an unexpected direction, as if his mind were now focused on surprise attack.
On the drive into town, he thought of Anna. They’d had few conversations at work, and all of them had been on business matters. They never met outside business hours, save for the weekends at the house, during which LaRoche had kept her almost entirely to himself, teaching her skills that she then had to demonstrate over and over until the most complex procedures flowed from her with the technical fluidity of an old hand. From time to time the three of them shared meals together, but even then LaRoche focused the conversation on her training, asking her questions, noting her answers, sometimes nodding with satisfaction but otherwise keeping his opinion of her to himself, though Danforth supposed that he was reporting his evaluations to Clayton.
So what did he know about this woman? Danforth asked himself now. Little beyond her steeliness and the fact that she was very bright. At the office, she quickly grasped every element of her training in imports, an intelligence Mrs. O’Rourke had mentioned on several occasions. At Winterset, she’d mastered Morse code and how to operate and repair a wireless with the same effortless alacrity with which she’d learned to fire a pistol and was now learning to make a bomb. He’d already noticed her astonishing ability to slip in and out of identities and to do it so quickly and completely that she seemed briefly to lose herself within them.
But it was her skill at languages that had most impressed Danforth. In conversation with her, he enjoyed the way she could move seamlessly from one to the other. Once she’d told him that it was impossible to know a people if you did not know their language and that if she were granted many lives she would spend them learning yet more languages. But you will have only one life, he thought suddenly as he was driving into town, and then, with a sense of distress, he added, And perhaps quite a short one.
Years later, as he stood in the bombed-out remains of Plötzensee Prison, Danforth remembered these thoughts, the way they’d come to him on the drive into town, and it occurred to him that love is, at bottom, simply the deepest of all sympathies, and that perhaps his love for Anna had begun the morning he’d watched her by the window and thought of all the immigrant girls like her, the arduousness of their labor, their limited prospects, and seen Anna as somehow their representative in his life. Still later it had been her tenderness that called to him, as he remembered on that same bleak occasion, the shattered walls of the prison perfectly symbolic of his own shattered life; after that it had been her resolve that drew him, and following that, her sacrifice, so in the end it seemed impossible that a love built on such a multifarious foundation could ever crumble and then boil up again as ire.
He reached the town in a few minutes. It was moving at its customarily slow pace as he drove down its single main street. There was a grocery store and a gas station, along with a clothing store and a five-and-dime. The town was typically American, quiet for the most part, and very neighborly. Danforth thought of the moment he’d committed himself to Clayton’s project and allowed himself to believe that by giving himself to that effort — even if only by providing small assistance — he was doing something to preserve and protect this little town and all the others like it. It might even be enough, though this possibility paled when he thought of Anna, the deadly skills she was being taught and would at some point employ. Providing a country house for her training was hardly at the same level.
The bandstand was surrounded by a small park, and as he approached it, Danforth saw a man in a brown jacket make his way toward it from the opposite direction. The man wore a dark hat pulled down low, like the figure he’d seen outside his apartment window, and Danforth felt certain that it was, in fact, the same man.
“So, French Impressionism,” Danforth said when he reached him.
The other man appeared darkly amused. “These little games will seem silly to us one day.” His tone was nostalgic, as if, like Anna, he too had already glimpsed his fate. He offered his hand. “I’m Ted Bannion.”
Bannion, Danforth thought, an Irish name. Unlike LaRoche, this man seemed well suited to his name, with his light hair and blue eyes, along with something in his manner that made it easy for Danforth to picture him in the execution yard of Kilmainham Gaol, shoulder to shoulder with Connolly and Pearce.
“Clayton has never mentioned you,” Danforth said.
Bannion plucked the sprig of lavender from the lapel of his jacket and tossed it onto the ground, as if to demonstrate his distance from such foolish trappings.
“I’ll be in charge of Anna once her training is finished,” Bannion said.
“She’s being trained for lots of things, it seems,” Danforth said cautiously, hoping he might get some hint as to what the Project actually was.
“So that she can train others,” Bannion said by way of explanation. His smile was bleak. “Our Joan of Arc.”
This seemed a hint that the Project was much broader than Danforth had previously imagined, Anna not one of a small cadre but the spearhead of a large force.
“Train them in several different languages,” Bannion added.
His accent was very faint, Danforth thought, and it seemed layered with other inflections, like a voice behind a mask.
“That’s her greatest asset,” Bannion said.
“Not her courage?” Danforth asked.
Bannion shrugged. “There’s never a shortage of courage,” he said. “It’s skill that’s hard to find.” He appeared sad that this was the case, that humanity was very good at meeting danger, very poor at knowing what to do about it. A realization of this fallen state, mankind nobly brave but helplessly incompetent, swam into his eyes, and Danforth thought it gave him the look of a disappointed god.