Quest for Anna Klein, The by Thomas H. Cook Page A

done by Germans.”
    He put down the menu and summoned the waiter. “The apple tart for me. And you, Paul?”
    â€œI’ll have the same.”
    The waiter stepped away.
    â€œOut of the blue, a uniformed Paris policeman came into the room,” Danforth continued. “And do you know what went through Augustin’s mind?
It’s over.
That’s what he thought.
Here is a French policeman. He will stop this immediately.
What a wonderful thing to have believed.” His smile was anything but cheerful. “And how much more wonderful had it been true.” He paused, eyeing me closely, then went on. “But the French policeman simply stood at attention and watched a little more rough treatment, this time with cigarettes. I’m sure you know what I mean.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAnd when one of Augustin’s torturers took out a fresh cigarette to continue the game, this same French policeman clicked his heels and dutifully stepped over and lit it for him.” He looked at me starkly. “Now
that
is a loss of innocence, Paul, a loss of belief in your own countrymen that makes my slight moral twinges by the bandstand entirely laughable.”
    I was relieved to hear this, since it was at one with my earlier thought and gave me to understand that wherever Danforth’s tale ultimately led, it would not be to some effete notion of wounded idealism.
    â€œYou’re right,” I said confidently. “Perspective gets lost in little moral misgivings.”
    â€œDo you think so, Paul?” Danforth asked. “I’m more of a mind to think that perspective gets lost in moral certainties.” He shrugged. “Which only means that no one was ever burned at the stake by a doubter.”
    Before I could reply to this curious remark, Danforth easedback slightly, and for a moment he seemed uncertain as to how he should proceed. “So much in life comes as a surprise,” he added softly, and I knew he was once again moving down the twisty path of his tale. “Things we were so sure of. People we thought we knew so well but perhaps did not know at all.” He added nothing to this; instead, he craned his neck slightly, so that I heard the brittle grind of ancient bones.
    â€œOld gears,” he said. “No oil can smooth them.” Then, again moving down a familiar trail, he returned to that long-ago afternoon. “She was in the woods when I got back from the bandstand,” he said.

Winterset, Connecticut, 1939
    She was in the woods when Danforth got back to Winterset. He caught only fleeting glimpses of her as she moved through line after gently swaying line of slender trees. She was walking slowly, as he would time and again recall, dressed in a dark blouse and a long equally dark skirt that fell below her ankles. She’d flattened her wild hair beneath the Old-World babushka common to the women he’d seen toiling in the frozen fields of Eastern Europe. In that way she suddenly seemed beyond any future assimilation, a woman fiercely, almost willfully, separated from himself and that part of his country that was most like him.
    And yet, it was this that inexplicably attracted him, the allure of something so foreign it called to him in the way of indecipherable languages, and that returned him to the haunting wonder of his boyhood days. She was like a city he didn’t know but wanted to, a vista he’d never seen but yearned to see. Bannion had been right. There was no shortage of courage. Every battlefield was strewn with it. But he sensed in Anna a fatalismshe had long ago accepted, making her seem like a woman walking toward her future just as religious martyrs walked toward their execution sites, as if there, and only there, they would find fulfillment.
    â€œDon’t get lost,” he said when he reached her. “These woods are deep.”
    â€œI never wander far,” she replied.
    He leaned against one of the trees and