Read Quest for Anna Klein, The Online
Authors: Thomas H Cook
Quest for Anna Klein, The
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.
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
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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)
COOK
THE QUEST FOR
ANNA KLEIN
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
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
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Century Club, New York City, 2001
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
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Century Club, New York City, 1939
Century Club, New York City, 2001
New Brunswick, Connecticut, 1939
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, France, 1939
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Century Club, New York City, 2001
Lexington Avenue, New York City, 2001
Washington Square Park, New York City, 1974
Lexington Avenue, New York City, 2001
Lexington Avenue, New York City, 2001
Lexington Avenue, New York City, 2001
Lexington Avenue, New York City, 2001
Lexington Avenue, New York City, 2001
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ALEXANDERPOPE
For Susan M. Terner, first reader, editor extraordinaire, and in all ways, my secret weapon
PART I
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 âpeople set down their glasses in country clubs,' struck by what he'd done.”