Free Quest for Anna Klein, The by Thomas H. Cook

room reading the latest report on the war in Europe while outside workmen raked fall leaves and plowed under the last of Cecilia’s summer garden.
    Danforth couldn’t pinpoint why he found this vision of his future unsettling, though he knew it was more than simply his familiar sense that the most adventurous part of his life had already passed. There was something in the deeply serious nature of Anna’s training, as well as her tirelessness in learning La Roche’s dark arts, that made him feel small and insignificant. He thought of the Apollonius statue of a pugilist at rest, its battered face and body. Here was a man who’d known the worst of it, who’d been seasoned by grave experience. It was not for nothing, Danforth admitted to himself, that there was no statue of the man who’d held his towel.
    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.
    â€œHello,” he said.
    â€œI’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.”
    â€œLavender?”
    Clayton laughed. “You remember those fields, don’t you, Tom?”
    â€œYes,” he said.
    â€œThe 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 eventhen 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