“We still have a lot of work,” LaRoche said to Anna when they reached him.
Danforth saw that LaRoche had already been told that Anna was to leave quite soon, though there was no hint that this speeded-up schedule disturbed him. And yet in the following days, small cracks began to appear in LaRoche’s otherwise granite exterior. Danforth noticed it in the way he grew more tender toward Anna during their sessions, and in the way his voice lost its coldness, a change in manner that made him appear almost fatherly in regard to her. He might have been teaching her to ride a bike, Danforth thought, or erect a tent, or any of a hundred other innocuous skills, and he sensed that LaRoche had come to fear for her and so had grown more gentle, as a parent might be more gentle with a child stricken by some dread disease.
~ * ~
Some two weeks later, Danforth and LaRoche sat alone in the front room, enjoying the final cigars of the evening. LaRoche had drunk considerably more than usual, and in that loosened state, he began to talk about the old kingdom of Azerbaijan, where he’d spent some time in the region’s busy trade-route capital of Baku.
“It was all silk and saffron then,” LaRoche said in a nearly musical way that suggested he’d heard these words in a song. His eyes closed with an intoxicated languor. “With towers and minarets, and plenty of oil too. Like Texas.” He leaned back, more relaxed than Danforth had ever seen him. “Everybody well fed. Even the camels.” He laughed. “Especially the camels.” Suddenly his face soured. “Then the czar stuck in his nose. The Azeris and the Armenians started cutting one another’s throats.” He stubbed out his cigar with the violence of one who knew what had been consumed in these ethnic fires. “And after the czar, the Bolsheviks.”
For a moment he seemed lost in a blasted idyll. Briefly, he watched a curl of blue smoke rise from the smoldering cigar. Then he grabbed his scotch and downed it in a single, tortured gulp.
“She’s a good woman, Anna,” he said, then rose to his feet and walked out the door.
Danforth sensed that he was being summoned, that LaRoche had something to tell him. He walked onto the front porch, where LaRoche stood.
It was an overcast evening, neither moon nor stars, and so solid darkness surrounded them. Danforth could barely make out LaRoche’s features, barely tell that another body stood near his, save for the labored sound of LaRoche’s breath and the liquor he smelled on it.
“Maybe I’m getting old,” LaRoche said in a voice that was hardly above a whisper. “Maybe I’m seeing things.”
“What things?” Danforth asked.
“Men,” LaRoche said. “Never the same ones.”
“Are you telling me that you’re being followed?” Danforth asked.
LaRoche shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Have you told anyone else about this?” Danforth asked.
LaRoche shook his head.
“I’ll speak to Clayton,” Danforth assured him.
“Good,” LaRoche said. “Maybe you take Anna somewhere else. Someplace so I don’t know where she is.” He paused, started to continue, then hesitated, making Danforth sense that he was about to hear a secret LaRoche had revealed to very few. “It’s easy to break a man.” For a time, he didn’t speak. When at last he did, the words fell like toppling headstones. “All gone, Kruševo.”
Kruševo, Danforth thought, and it all suddenly came clear. The ten-day republic.
One of Danforth’s Far East business associates had been in Macedonia when the Kruševo rebellion began, and he had more than once related the horrors of its suppression, Turkish atrocities piled one upon the other like bodies in a lorry. They’d razed towns and farms, cut a blood-soaked swath of terror through the region and put thousands to flight, a pitiable throng, bitter and defeated, doomed to be forever homeless, and no doubt among whose dispirited number had been LaRoche himself.
“A man will break under the lash,” LaRoche murmured softly, and now Danforth was unsure of whether LaRoche had suffered the outrages of Kruševo or inflicted them.
Danforth started to speak, but LaRoche suddenly whirled around and grabbed his arm in a tight grip. “Clayton should hide Anna,” he said emphatically “He should hide her soon.” Even in the darkness, LaRoche’s eyes glittered with the cold sparkle of broken glass. “And tell no one where she is.”
Danforth said nothing. LaRoche’s voice, drunken though it was, had been so fierce and heartrending that in the wake of his words, as the two men lingered in the night, silent and enclosed, he felt himself more adrift than ever in this new, darker world where nothing seemed entirely within anyone’s control.
~ * ~
Century Club, New York City, 2001
“Perhaps a glass of port, Paul?” Danforth asked. He’d stopped his story abruptly and now daintily touched the corners of his mouth with a napkin. “Or are you afraid it might dull your senses?”
I took this as something of a challenge, one I felt I should meet.
“I think I can handle a port,” I said.
“Good,” Danforth said, his smile quite bright for one who’d just related such an ominous exchange. “A port it shall be.” He summoned the waiter and ordered two glasses of a port I didn’t recognize but, given Danforth’s refinements of taste, assumed was excellent.
“Did Clayton do it?” I asked once the waiter had stepped away.
“Do what?”
“Hide Anna.”
“No, but I did tell him what Bannion had told me at the bandstand and about the conversation with LaRoche, how worried they both had been. But Clayton decided to keep to the same road at the moment. He said Anna would be headed for Europe soon anyway. Until then, he thought her quite safe. Bannion was always overstating things, he said, and LaRoche had grown ridiculously close to Anna and was acting unprofessionally. Besides, he was sure no one had caught on to the Project.”
“That’s all he said?”
“Yes, and he was very convincing,” Danforth said. “Clayton was always very convincing. And what he said was true. You can’t run an operation if you react to every fear.”
In order to keep vaguely to my mission, I asked a technical question. “What should you react to?”
“Doubt,” Danforth said. “If you suddenly feel a quaver of uncertainty, you should look closely at what caused it.”
“Did you feel such a quaver?” I asked. “In terms of the Project, I mean.”
“Yes.”
“Caused by what?”
“Clayton,” Danforth answered. “He was concerned about Anna, her many guises. We were moving closer to the time when she would be sent to Europe, and so he wanted to be sure of her.”
“Sure of her?”
“Who she was,” Danforth said. “Sure of her story. Bannion had given Clayton a full account of himself. All those years he worked for the Communists. Strikes he’d been involved in. Organizing. He’d even gone to fight in the Spanish civil war. After that, his disillusionment. He’d tried to switch sides completely, become an informer against his old comrades. Clayton had checked out every detail of Bannion’s story and knew he’d told him the truth. But Anna’s past was more obscure, so he wanted to make certain of her. It’s the small lies that trip you up, so that was the place to start, he said. Her story about being on Ellis Island, for example, of being held there because she had trachoma. There would be records of something like that. It would be possible to find out of she’d actually been there.”