THE QUEST FOR ANNA KLEIN
Thomas H. Cook is one of the world’s most respected crime writers. He won an Edgar award for his novel The Chatham School Affair and has been shortlisted for the award six times, most recently with Red Leaves, which was also shortlisted for the Duncan Lawrie Gold Dagger award. Cook lives with his family in Cape Cod and New York City.
Books by Thomas H. Cook
FICTION
Blood Innocents
The Orchids
Tabernacle
Elena
Sacrificial Ground
Flesh and Blood
Streets of Fire
Night Secrets
The City When It Rains
Evidence of Blood
Mortal Memory
Breakheart Hill
The Chatham School Affair
Instruments of Night
Places in the Dark
The Interrogation
Taken (based on the teleplay by Leslie Boehm)
Moon over Manhattan (with Larry King)
Peril
Into the Web
Red Leaves
The Cloud of Unknowing
Master of the Delta
The Fate of Katherine Carr
The Last Talk with Lola Faye
The Quest for Anna Klein
NONFICTION
Early Graves
Blood Echoes
A Father’s Story (as told by Lionel Dahmer)
Best American Crime Writing 2000, 2001 (ed. with Otto Penzler)
Best American Crime Writing 2002 (ed. with Otto Penzler)
Best American Crime Writing 2003 (ed. with Otto Penzler)
Best American Crime Writing 2004 (ed. with Otto Penzler)
Best American Crime Writing 2005 (ed. with Otto Penzler)
Best American Crime Writing 2006 (ed. with Otto Penzler)
Best American Crime Reporting 2007 (ed. with Otto Penzler)
Best American Crime Reporting 2008 (ed. with Otto Penzler)
Best American Crime Reporting 2009 (ed. with Otto Penzler)
Best American Crime Reporting 2010 (ed. with Otto Penzler)
THOMAS H.
COOK
THE QUEST FOR
ANNA KLEIN
First published in the United States of America in 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
This edition first published in Great Britain in 2011 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © 2011 by Thomas H. Cook.
Published by special arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
The right of Thomas H. Cook to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-85789-259-1
Trade paperback ISBN: 978-0-85789-260-7
ebook ISBN: 978-0-85789-467-0
Printed in Great Britain.
Corvus
An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
Ormond House
26-27 Boswell Street
London WC1N 3JZ
www.corvus-books.co.uk
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PART I The Slenderness of Bones
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Delmonico’s, New York City, 1939
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Old Town Bar, New York City, 1939
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Old Town Bar, New York City, 1939
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Pulitzer Fountain, New York City, 1939
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Dugout Bar, New York City, 1939
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Danforth Imports, New York City, 1939
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Winterset, Connecticut, 1939
Century Club, New York City, 2001
PART II The Point of a Spoon
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Winterset, Connecticut, 1939
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Winterset, Connecticut, 1939
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Oak Bar, Plaza Hotel, New York City, 1939
Century Club, New York City, 2001
New York Public Library, New York City, 1939
Century Club, New York City, 2001
214 West Ninety-fifth Street, New York City, 1939
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Winterset, Connecticut, 1939
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Century Club, New York City, 1939
Century Club, New York City, 2001
New Brunswick, Connecticut, 1939
PART III Chekhov’s Hammer
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, France, 1939
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Paris, France, 1939
Century Club, New York City, 2001
The Savoy, London, 1939
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Paris, France, 1939
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Orléans, France, 1939
Century Club, New York City, 2001
PART IV The Scent of Almonds
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Orléans, France, 1939
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
Orléans, France, 1939
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
Berlin, Germany, 1939
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
Berlin, Germany, 1939
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
PART V The Digger’s Game
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
Berlin, Germany, 1939
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
Munich, Germany, 1939
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
Munich, Germany, 1939
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
Munich, Germany, 1939
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
PART VI The Nightingale Floor
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
London, England, 1939
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
Southern France, 1942
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
Nuremberg, Germany, 1946
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
Lemberg, Ukraine, 1951
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
Moscow, Soviet Union, 1952
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
PART VII Traitor’s Gate
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
Kolyma, Soviet Union, 1964
Lexington Avenue, New York City, 2001
Washington Square Park, New York City, 1974
Lexington Avenue, New York City, 2001
Baku, Azerbaijan, 1981
Lexington Avenue, New York City, 2001
Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1983
Munich, Germany, 1939
Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1983
Lex
ington Avenue, New York City, 2001
Magadan, Russia, 1986
Lexington Avenue, New York City, 2001
Erzinghan, Turkey, 1915
Lexington Avenue, New York City, 2001
And hence one master passion in the breast, Like Aaron’s serpent, swallows up the rest.
— ALEXANDERPOPE
For Susan M. Terner, first reader, editor extraordinaire, and in all ways, my secret weapon
PART I
The Slenderness of Bones
Century Club, New York City, 2001
The question was never whether she would live or die, for that had been decided long ago.
Danforth had said this flatly at one point deep in our conversation, a conclusion he’d evidently come to by way of a painful journey.
It had taken time for him to reach this particular remark. As I’d learned by then, he was a man who kept to his own measured pace. After our initial greeting, for example, he’d taken an agonizingly slow sip from his scotch and offered a quiet, grand-fatherly smile. “People in their clubs,” he said softly. “Isn’t that how Fitzgerald put it? People in their clubs who set down their drinks and recalled their old best dreams. I must seem that way to you. An old man with a head full of woolly memories.” His smile was like an arrow launched from a great distance. “But even old men can be dangerous.”
I’d come to New York from Washington, traveled from one stricken city to another, it seemed, a novice member of the think tank that had recently hired me. My older colleagues had manned the desks of what had once been called Soviet Studies. They’d been very assiduous in these studies. There’d hardly been a ruble spent on missiles or manure that they hadn’t recorded and scrutinized. But for all that, not one of them had foreseen the abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union, how it would simply dissolve into the liquefying fat of its own simmering cor-ruption. That stunning failure in forecasting had shaken their confidence to the core and sent them scrambling for an explanation. They’d still been searching for it years later when the attack had come even more staggeringly out of nowhere. That had been a far graver failure to understand the enemy at our gates, and it had sharply, and quite conveniently for me, changed their focus. Now I, the youngest of their number, their latest hire, had been dispatched to interview Thomas Jefferson Danforth, a man I’d never heard of but who’d written to tell me that he had “experience” that might prove useful, as he’d put it, to “policymakers” such as myself, “especially now.” The interview was not a prospect I relished, and I knew it to be the sort of task doled out to freshman colleagues more or less as a training exercise, but it was better than standing guard at the copying machine or fetching great stacks of research materials from the bowels of various government agencies.
“I remember that line of Fitzgerald’s,” I told Danforth, just to let him know that, although a mere wisp of a boy by his lights, I was well educated, perhaps even a tad worldly. “It was about Lindbergh. How ‘people set down their glasses in country clubs,’ struck by what he’d done.”
“A solo flight across the Atlantic that remindent them of what they’d once been or had hoped to be,” Danforth added. Now his smile suddenly seemed deeply weighted, like a bet against the odds. “Youth is a country with closed borders,” he said. “All that’s valuable must be smuggled in.”
I assumed this remark was rhetorical and found it somewhat condescending, but our conversation had just begun and so I let it pass.
Danforth winced as he shifted in his chair. “Old bones,” he explained. “So, what is your mission, Mr. Crane? The grand one, I mean.”
“Our country’s good,” I answered. “Is that grand enough?”
What remained of Danforth’s smile vanished. “I was young like you.” His voice was even, his tone cautionary, as if he regarded my youth as an animal that could easily turn on me. “Clever and self-confident. It was a very good feeling, as I recall.”
He’d been described to me as reticent, distant, somber, and his experience in what my senior associates still called “the great game” had been brief and long ago. For these reasons, I’d concluded that in all likelihood he could offer little of value to the present situation. But in the still-settling dust of the Towers’ collapse, every corner was being searched, every source, no matter how remote and seemingly irrelevant, gleaned for information. The gyroscope at the center of our expertise had been struck by those planes — so the thinking went — and it had wobbled, and now all its movements had to be recalibrated.
And so, after reading Danforth’s letter, Dr. Carlson had decided that Danforth might have something to add to our intelligence. He’d told me that Danforth did not give interviews, so it was quite surprising that I’d been singled out for this audience.
“Have you ever met the old buzzard?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Then why you, Paul?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “Maybe he saw that little piece I wrote in Policy Options.”
“Oh, well,” Dr. Carlson said. “At least you’ll get to see the Century Club.”
Which was indeed something of a treat, I had to admit, as I glanced about the room in which Danforth and I now faced each other, its bookshelves lined with works written by the club’s members.
“A very impressive place,” I said.
“If one is easily impressed,” Danforth replied with a slight smile. “I read your article on the current crisis. You seem very certain, I must say, in regard to what should be done.”
I shrugged. “It’s not really a very prestigious publication,” I told him with slightly feigned modesty. “More of an opinion sampler where graduate students attempt to get noticed. Which I did, evidently. By you.”
“Your father was a professor of foreign affairs,” Danforth said.
My father’s position at a rather modest little college had been mentioned in the brief biography that accompanied my article, so I wasn’t surprised that Danforth was aware of it. Still, there was an air of clandestine knowledge in his tone; he seemed to carry, almost like a mark upon his brow, the faded brand of a spy.
“Yes, he was,” I told him. “He never made policy, of course . . .”
“Which is clearly what you hope to do?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm,” Danforth said. He drew a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and read: “‘Our response should flow from passion as much as policy, and should bear with it a hint of the paranoid.’” He looked at me quite seriously. “So there should be no irrationality gap between ourselves and our enemies.”
His remark held no mockery, it seemed to me; Danforth truly appeared to be considering what I’d written.
“My point is that now is not a time for half measures,” I replied. “Not in the face of these medievalists.”
“The target is all,” Danforth said. “Picking it and destroying it. Which is where true intelligence comes in.”
Comfortably seated amid the old-fashioned opulence of the Century Club, Danforth looked very much the worldly intelligence offi cer who’d once sipped cognac and smoked cigars with the sort of characters one might find in Graham Greene or Somerset Maugham. His suit had passed its prime, and his tie was unstylishly wide, but I could imagine him as a figure from a bygone age, a handsome young man in a white dinner jacket, lounging on some tropical veranda, watching a steamer move out of the harbor. There would be riotously colored birds in the long green fronds of the nearby trees, and on that ship, a woman in a satin dress would be standing with a champagne glass in her long white fingers, lifting it to him silently, Adieu, mon amour. He was part of a vanished time, I thought, a lost world, and because of that, my current mission seemed even more a matter of giving the new boy something to do.
“You’re an Ivy Leaguer,” Danforth said. “Columbia.” His gaze softened, and I saw the wound we shared. “A fellow New Yorker.”
A familiar wave of kill-them-all rage passed over me at the barbarity that had been inflicted upon wha
t had always seemed the most American of cities, but I tamped it down with a crisp “Yes.”
Even so, it was clear that Danforth had seen the flame that briefly lit my eyes.
“Hatred is a very legitimate emotion,” he said. “Believe me, I’ve known it well, and certainly at this moment we have a right to our ire.”
This was a different position from the self-loathing justifications for the attack that had lately wafted up from various quarters, and I was relieved to hear it.
“Anyway,” Danforth said, “I’m sure the best think tanks are bloated with boys like you.”
I didn’t like the term bloated but nodded anyway, now a little impatient to get on with the interview, write up my report, and head back to Washington. “So?” I said hastily. “Shall we go on?”
Danforth noted my impatience. “You are a very focused young man.” His expression was quite gentle, perhaps even a bit indulgent. I might almost have called it Socratic.
“Crane,” he said. “An English name.”
“Yes, but I’m really of German stock,” I answered. “At least, for the most part.”
“So a name must have been changed along the way,” Danforth said. “What was it before?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “My grandfather changed it during the war.” I offered a quick smile. “I suppose he didn’t want to be blamed for things he hadn’t done.”
Danforth nodded. “Quite understandable. No one would have wanted to be accused of things like that.”
“And which he couldn’t have done because he left Germany before the war,” I added.
Danforth smiled. “Do you speak German?”
“Not since high school.”
“That’s a pity,” Danforth said. “Certain words in that language often come to mind. Rache, for example. It has a rough sound, don’t you think? Kind of a snarl. It sounds like what it means: ‘vengeance.’ But others don’t sound anything like what they mean, of course. For example, Verrat doesn’t sound like what it means at all.”
“What does Verrat mean?”
“‘Betrayal.’”
Before I could respond to this, Danforth turned toward the window, beyond which a gentle snow was falling. “There was a lot of fear after the Crash of Twenty-nine,” he said. “People were desperate.” His gaze turned searching. “I’m sure you’ve read about it in your history books.”