Quest for Anna Klein, The by Thomas H. Cook Read Free Book Online Page A

proficiencies varied widely. Most were eager to be employed, though Danforth knew that very few of them would go hungry as a result of being out of work.
    But a few less well-heeled applicants also showed up, always in suits they’d bought off the rack. These were first-generationmen who had no claim to any distinctions they had not won by their own efforts. Danforth admired them in a way he could not admire the others or himself, and he would have hired them to fill other positions if any had been available. He liked the cut of them, their modest style, even the slightly beleaguered quality they tried to hide.
    There were no female applicants until Anna showed up a few days after the ad appeared, a delay Danforth thought ordered by Clayton and for which no explanation was requested or given.
    She wore a surprisingly professional ensemble: tweed suit, white blouse, a single gold chain at her neck, and a pair of matching earrings.
    â€œMiss . . . Klein?” Danforth asked when he looked up from her perfectly typed resumé.
    Her smile was quite bright, as were her eyes. “Yes,” she said. She thrust out her hand energetically. “Pleased to meet you, sir.”
    The transformation was stunning. There was no hint of either the frenetic female who’d snatched at her things in the Old Town Bar or the curiously aggressive young woman who’d slid into his booth at the Dugout Bar four days earlier.
    She was more than an actress, Danforth thought; she was a chameleon.
    For the next few minutes, they did the dance of prospective employer and prospective employee. Danforth asked the usual questions, and Anna gave the expected answers. He showed no hint that he’d ever met her, and neither did she. He maintained a strict professional air, and she an eager one, as if anxious to be offered the job.
    Cautiously, as they neared the end of the interview, he asked a question he would have considered vital even if he’d had no knowledge of the woman before him.
    â€œDo you have a passport?” he asked.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œYou’ll need to get one.” His smile was coolly professional, as he thought it should be. “If you get the job, of course.” He glanced at her resumé. “I suppose that will be all for now.”
    With that, she left the offi ce, but something of her lingered through the day, an awareness of her that surprised Danforth as he went about the usual business routines. From time to time, he looked up from his desk at the chair she’d sat in during their brief meeting, and strangely, its emptiness created a hunger to see her again. It was a feeling he found curiously new and faintly alarming, like the first sensation of a narcotic one knew one must henceforth avoid.
    At six he packed his briefcase with the evening’s work and stepped out of his offi ce.
    Mrs. O’Rourke, his secretary, was sitting at her desk. She handed Danforth a small envelope. “This came by messenger.”
    Once in the elevator, Danforth opened the envelope and read the note:
Six o’clock. Sit near the fountain at Washington Square.
    He’d thought he might find Anna seated on a bench near the fountain, but she was nowhere to be seen, and so he took a seat and waited. For a time, he simply watched various Village types as they strolled beneath the bare trees: professors and students with briefcases and books, a bearded artist lugging paints and easel, two workmen precariously balancing a large piece of glass.
    The man who finally approached him was short and compactly built, a little steel ball of a fellow. Danforth had noticed that he’d cruised twice around the fountain, then broken from that orbit and drifted along the far edge of the park, and then around it, until at last he’d seemed satisfied of something. That Danforth was the man he’d been sent to meet? That he wasn’t being followed? Danforth had no idea. He knew only that as if in response to a