The Quest for Anna Klein

Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

“And so we approached the last days,” Danforth said. “We would all go to Munich. Bannion would keep an eye on Braunes Haus at Briennerstrasse forty-five, near the Konigsplatz, the Nazi headquarters where Hitler was likely to spend a good deal of his time while he was in Munich. I would station myself in a hotel room within view of the Osteria Bavaria. Anna would remain in a nearby hotel until it was time for her to go to the restaurant. The idea was that she would go there every day for lunch and dinner. If the target showed up, and she could get in range, she would shoot him.”

“With Bannion always waiting outside the restaurant if she failed,” I said.

Danforth drained the last of his drink. “Simple as that, Paul.”

“Simple, yes.” I hesitated before my next remark. “Forgive me, but it sounds very . . . haphazard.”

“Does it?”

“Well, you have no specific intelligence component,” I said. “Other than that information Bannion got from Rache and this unnamed British agent.”

“His name was Alexander Foote, as I found out later,” Danforth said. “You can look him up, if you like.”

“I don’t doubt that he existed,” I assured Danforth quickly. “But the nature of his intelligence was so general that it couldn’t have been of much use.”

“It was of no use at all really,” Danforth agreed. “Except that it was clear it was possible to get quite close to the target at the Osteria Bavaria because Foote had already done it.”

“But that is hardly actionable intelligence,” I insisted.

“Well, certainly no more ‘actionable intelligence’ than Oswald had,” Danforth said casually. “Not much more than John Wilkes Booth had. In fact, not much more than any of those boy assassins in Sarajevo who waited for Franz Ferdinand’s car to go by. Just to be at the right place at the right time.”

I looked at him quizzically. “So you don’t believe in elaborate planning?”

“What I believe in, Paul, is human incompetence,” Danforth said. “You can simply depend on incompetence within the security system to give you an opening at some point. You wait for that opening, and then you strike.” He smiled. “All the training at my country house, all Bannion’s information about Hitler’s layers of security, all my traipsing around Berlin pretending that I could find just the right place, all of that finally came down to one thing: a guy likes to eat at a certain restaurant, and if you’re in that restaurant when he eats there, you can kill him.”

Something in Danforth’s demeanor darkened, and the tone of his voice became intimate, as if he were speaking not to a think-tank freshman young enough to be his grandson but to someone who was tied to this ancient conspiracy. “Which brings me to the final act of this part of my story, Paul.” His gaze took on a troubled wonder. “The trick love plays in life.”

~ * ~

Munich, Germany, 1939

The pistol was the same model and caliber LaRoche had used at Winterset, and Bannion’s manner was quite casual when he drew it from his jacket and handed it to Danforth.

The instructions that followed were simple: Danforth was to meet Anna in the square outside the restaurant as the dinner hour approached. He was to give her the pistol. She would take it into the restaurant.

“She should never have the gun until she goes into the restaurant,” Bannion said “Since she’s the only one of us who has a reservation at the Osteria, it would be her room they’d search.”

The target was scheduled to arrive in the city that same afternoon, and Bannion had found out —either from Rache or Foote — that he was inclined to have dinner at the Osteria Bavaria on his second day in Munich, usually around seven. The British agent had even been able to provide the fact that it was the table to the right of the entrance he preferred, an odd choice, Bannion noted, since it was by a window that looked out onto the street. The final elements of the plan had been put in place that very morning, Bannion went on, a reservation made in Anna’s name. The only thing that remained was for Danforth to keep the pistol in his room until the following morning, when he would transfer it to Anna.

“What about the cyanide?” Danforth asked.

Bannion patted the blue handkerchief in his jacket pocket. “In here,” he said. “Mine and hers.”

“You don’t want me to give it to her with the pistol?” Danforth asked.

“No,” Bannion said. “I’ll give it to her. It’s the last test. Rache says it works every time.”

“Works how?”

“If the person takes the tablet, he will complete the mission,” Bannion said.

In his memory, Danforth would later see Anna’s tablet many times, always with wonder at how very small it was, no larger than a pea, the poison contained in a thin-walled ampoule coated with rubber to prevent it from breaking under anything less forceful than a human bite.

“What about mine?” Danforth asked.

Bannion smiled. “Giving you a cyanide tablet would just be drama, Tom. After you give Anna the pistol, you’re to go directly to the station and take the train to Hamburg. Passage has already been booked for you to Copenhagen, and from there to London.”

He walked to the door, started to open it, then hesitated. “I know you love her, Tom. For you, it’s only her.”

“Yes,” Danforth admitted.

For a time they talked only about Anna, and it became clear to Danforth that Bannion had closely observed her though even he could not say what had moved her to do the thing she was soon to do.

“There’s something I still don’t know,” Bannion said at last. Then, with a shrug, he said, “Tell her story, Tom.”

Danforth had never felt so entirely diminished. He was to be the chronicler of Anna’s martyrdom, and Bannion’s. He was to share their plot but not their peril. But he had sworn to do as he was ordered, and so he said, “I will, Ted.”

Bannion looked unexpectedly moved by Danforth’s sincerity but said nothing further before he closed the door.

Once Bannion had departed, a curious drive took Danforth to the window. He looked out and felt almost as if he’d been expecting to see what was there: Anna, standing beneath a street-lamp. Bannion approached her, and for a time they talked. He was giving her some final words of encouragement, Danforth assumed, or perhaps offering his admiration for what she was to do. He would no doubt have a good speech. He’d given it often enough to miners and timber men, urging them toward the revolutionary ideal he had later so completely abandoned.

Then Bannion reached into his pocket and drew out the blue handkerchief Danforth had seen earlier. He was speaking softly as he opened it. Even from the distance, Danforth saw how intently Anna peered at the two tablets Bannion’s handkerchief had concealed. For a time she seemed frozen in dread; she stood like a frightened child, her hand poised over the ampoules, unable to reach down. Then, very slowly, she drew one from the folds of the handkerchief and sank it into the pocket of her skirt.

Then Bannion stepped very near to her, apparently for an intimate communication; he spoke, and it caused Anna to glance up to where Danforth stood concealed in the darkness behind his window. The distance was long. Danforth’s room was on the fourth floor; Anna’s face, only half illuminated by the street-lamp, was anything but clear. And yet for all that, Danforth saw a shadow pass over her face, something grave and curiously indelicate, as if an unbearable thought had crossed her mind. Then she turned to Bannion again, and a dreadful stillness fell over her, one that lingered for a time. At last she shook her head, and then nodded, as if, exhausted and depleted, she had finally allowed her no to give way to yes.

With that, Bannion stepped away, and the two of them exchanged a look that reminded Danforth of the doomed characters in movies and popular novels who, torn apart by war or some other fearful circumstance, seemed to know at the moment of their parting that they would never see each other again. Then Bannion turned and, like a character exiting the stage, vanished into the shadowy wings of Munich, leaving Anna alone.

She had never looked more intensely solitary, Danforth thought; she briefly seemed as if she had been driven to the most remote corner of the world. It was an aloneness that was dense and impenetrable, and horribly unfair, and it made Danforth suddenly hate Adolf Hitler, not for his aggression, his cruelty, his dreadful loathing of the Jews and the Communists, the Poles and the Slavs, not for the threat he posed to all that was kind and well reasoned in human life, but simply because the ending of that squalid, repellent life would take from him the one woman he knew, now with utter certainty, he would ever love.

~ * ~

Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

“You think you know the depth of selfishness when you look into your own heart and realize that you want someone dead because that person slighted you in some way, made you feel small or stupid or something of that sort,” Danforth said. “Or you want someone dead because of an inheritance or because you want a higher post in some university faculty, neither of which can be achieved until someone dies.” He offered a small, rather desolate laugh. “But at that moment in Munich, standing at that window, watching Anna, I learned how deep selfishness could go.” He stared at his empty glass. “For me, Adolf Hitler was not a megalomaniac who threatened to destroy the world but rather, strangely and perversely, my rival for Anna, the other man in her life, the one who’d stolen her from me.” He lifted his eyes from the glass and settled his gaze on me. “I was not just a romantic. I was a bourgeois solipsist, utterly incapable of seeing history as anything but a personal narrative.” His laugh was pure self-accusation. “I was like the obsessed man in some cheap thriller.”

He looked like that man even now, afflicted by old torments, his gaze more intense than before, and with something of self-loathing in it.

“I wanted to be like Anna,” he continued. “Like Bannion. I wanted to die for some great cause. But at that instant, I knew that I was nothing but a lovesick fool who would have rushed Anna out of Munich and back to New York and let the whole world go up in flames if he could.” He laughed again, this time even more bitterly. “Aristotle defined an evil man as one who cannot distinguish between what he wants and the universal good.” He pointed to himself. “That was me. I wanted Anna. I cared for nothing else.” He was silent for a moment, then he said, “You wanted to know what it was, the digger’s game?”

“Yes.”

“It came from Clayton.”

Clayton had come back to New York after Pearl Harbor, Danforth went on to tell me, and by the middle of 1942, he was working in military intelligence. He’d never actually run agents, but he’d evaluated trainees for their potential as agents.

“His job was to find out if they had the right stuff,” Danforth said. “Clayton was always fond of strategies and so he devised a little test. It was called the digger’s game. He had a number of small brass pieces inscribed with various words and phrases: losing your wife, losing your child, poverty, illness, that sort of thing. These pieces were put in an urn filled with sand, and the applicant was to dig until he found the thing he most dreaded, at which point the applicant was to stop digging.” Danforth picked up his empty glass and twirled it slowly between his hands. “There was only one piece that mattered to Clayton. If the potential agent stopped digging before he reached it, Clayton would no longer consider him. Do you know what that piece had written on it, Paul?” He smiled. “Failure” He paused, a man reevaluating an earlier conclusion. “I think Anna would not have stopped digging until she found failure,” he said. “But I would have stopped digging at losing Anna.” His mind turned inward, remained there for a time, then swept out to me again.

“And so I decided not to lose her,” he said.

~ * ~

Munich, Germany, 1939

He knew that it would negate everything she had worked for. He knew that it would be abandoning his own great drive to make a mark. He knew that it would be a lost opportunity to change the course of history. He knew all this, and didn’t care. He had gone over every other route he might take through life after losing Anna, and not one of them made sense or had meaning or filled the void within him that she filled. Years later, as he sought the pieces of the plot, he would sometimes tell himself that he had fallen victim to a strange form of romantic imprinting, and he would blame this on his youth and on the intensity of the times and on the mission they’d shared and the danger, and that all of this had created an overdetermined situation in his heart. He would say this to himself in icy hotel rooms and in rattling railway carriages and once as, pale and stricken, he passed beneath the wrought-iron gate with the words Arbeit macht frei, but he would never forget the irresistible force that had driven him to hatch so many arguments so desperately, and he would always call it love.

“Anna,” he said that night in Munich as he opened his door and saw her standing there.

“I don’t mean to disturb you, Tom,” she said.

“No one would want to be alone ... on such a night,” he said. “Come in.”

She walked into his room. She had been there before, of course, but now she seemed unsettled, as if she were uncertain what she should do next.

“Shall I call down for…tea ... or ... ?”

She shook her head. “No, nothing.”

She glanced toward the bureau across the room, and he wondered if by some gift of intuition she knew that was where he’d placed her pistol, wrapped in a white handkerchief.

“Please, sit,” Danforth said.

She took a seat in the little chair a few feet from the bed. Her movement was slow and graceful, and had he not been convinced of the unlikelihood of such a thing, he might have even thought it vaguely seductive.

“Actually, I was hoping to see you . . . before,” he told her.

She looked away, drew the scarf from her head and draped it over the back of the chair. When she looked back at him, she smiled, but her smile was quick and formless, as if she were an actress not yet completely in character.

“We’re to meet in the square,” she said, as if confirming an insignificant detail. “You’ll give me everything I need.”

“Yes.”

She said nothing else, and in that silence, the terrible solitude in her eyes swept over him, and as it swept, it reduced to dust all the arguments he might have made against her dying and left him bare of everything but anguish. This boiled up and would have burst from him had he not been able to suppress it at the last second and say only, “I’ll miss you, Anna.”

For a moment she seemed locked in a great inner turmoil, as if powerfully drawn in two opposite directions. Then an unexpected sigh broke from her, and she came toward him with a force that he would forever recall as tidal.

In the years to come, he would witness what happened next in countless renderings. He would see it flicker with increasing graphicness on movie screens and read of it in the increasingly clinical language of books. He would hear it sung by crooners and folksingers and rock bands, the movements of that night recounted at various times by swelling violins and by the pounding beat of electric bass guitars. He would see and hear that night’s events reimagined and reorchestrated in theaters, opera houses, museums, and concert halls; in countless ways and by countless means, he would attempt to resume the rapture he felt during those brief minutes of his life . . . and each time, he would fail.

When the last shudder had subsided, he felt like a character in a Russian novel, love and death mingled in that darkly Slavic way, and he wanted to turn to her, run his fingers down the length of her naked body, and say something so profound neither of them would ever forget it.

But silence was all he could offer, a silence that struck him as sweet and tender and that, as it lengthened, convinced him she would now relent. For he was a romantic, after all, and no romantic could believe that a woman who was loved as Anna now had to know she was loved could choose to go out and die.

Then she said, “Where is the pistol?”

When he didn’t answer, she rolled over and faced him, her head still on the pillow. “I should take it with me when I leave.”

“I’m supposed to give it to you tomorrow,” Danforth told her.

“It is tomorrow, Tom,” she said.

“Bannion said not to give it to you until just before you go into the restaurant.”

She shook her head. “No, now.”

“Why?”

“Because this should be our last time together,” Anna said firmly.

She rolled away from him and lay on her back, the sheet modestly pulled up over her naked breasts so that she seemed already enshrouded.

“Where is it?” she asked.

He nodded toward the bureau, expecting that she would immediately go to it. But instead, she remained in place, very still, her eyes cast toward the ceiling, and for a moment she actually seemed to consider letting this cup pass from her. This gave him the brief hope that in a simple, quiet way, he had saved the woman he was certain was the only love he would ever know. It was a certainty common to youth, as he would many times admit, but in his later age, it would prove in his case to have been starkly true.

“Goodbye, Tom,” she said.

Her voice now held that old steeliness, and so it didn’t surprise him that she rose, wrapped the sheet around her body, and began to gather up her clothes. There was a quickness in all this, however, and he saw in that quickness that she was having to fight the deep current of her own conviction. For that reason, he expected her to rush from the room, like some heroine in a film, but instead of doing anything so dramatic, she simply and quite slowly turned away, then disappeared into the adjoining bathroom.

He could hear water running, her feet padding about, then the rustle of her clothes as she dressed herself behind the closed door, and in the soft intimacy of these sounds he understood with complete fullness how deep his love for her actually ran, knew without doubt that he wanted to live his life with her, wanted them to drift together into maturity and from there into age and then move inexorably toward that moment of supreme mourning when one of them would know that it was not just a dream, that one could, in fact, love another person for one’s whole life through.

She was fully dressed when she came back into the room, and he could see that she had used the time to steel herself against any further argument.

“Is it loaded?” she asked.

“Yes,” Danforth said.

He turned away as she headed for the bureau and kept his face to the wall during the time it took her to open the drawer, walk to the door of his room, and open it.

“Tom,” she said.

He turned to her.

“Remember me” was all she said.

~ * ~

Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

He would always remember the gently falling rain of that next morning, Danforth told me, how the drops had moved jaggedly down the windows of his hotel room, and how he’d heard the low rumble of thunder that rolled over Munich as he sat there alone.

“Things were dark enough without an omen, of course,” he added.

“Dark, yes,” I said.

He reached for the handkerchief in his jacket pocket, and I saw that his fingers were trembling.

“It’s easy to hide something in a handkerchief, Paul,” he said.

With that, he spread the handkerchief out on the table, took a dime from his pocket, placed it at the center of the handkerchief, folded the handkerchief neatly over it, then returned the handkerchief, peak down, to his jacket pocket.

“It’s called the TV fold now,” he informed me. “Because it was the sort of fold men used in the forties and fifties.”

“The sort of fold you must have used then,” I said.

“Yes.” He patted the front pocket of his jacket. “The concealed item is at the bottom of the fold.”

He was obviously speaking about the cyanide tablet Bannion had concealed in a similar handkerchief.

“What about you?” I asked. “Did you have a tablet?”

“Me? No,” Danforth said. “I was to flee. I was the rat leaping from the sinking ship. There was no need for me to have cyanide.” He looked at me significantly. “You know, Paul, quite a few people who tried to kill Hitler were captured. Some remained alive for years. Held in prison for years, as I later learned. But not one of them survived the war.”

“So in a sense, it was just as you said at the beginning of your story,” I reminded him. “The question was never whether she would live or die. For that had been decided long ago.”

“Hmm,” Danforth breathed, and on that breath returned me to Munich in the rain.

~ * ~

Munich, Germany, 1939

For a time he could only sit in the chair by the window and watch the rain cascade down the glass panes. He felt numb and deflated and without resources. Bannion had made it clear that they would have only one chance, and on the wave of that urgency, any hope for escape had closed. If Anna got close enough, she would fire, and after that, if the target was still alive and rushing from the restaurant, Bannion would fire, and then each would die either in the hail of bullets that followed or by biting down on the cyanide.

He knew that all this would transpire within a few hours, and yet he still dreamed of somehow averting it, of them all meeting at the railway station, taking the next train for Hamburg, then going by sea to Copenhagen and from there to Dover, where Bannion would go one way and he and Anna another, perhaps north to Scotland, where a great green forest would enfold them and they would live out their days in a forest fantasy, like Robin Hood and Maid Marian.

It was a fantasy that urged its false reality on him so powerfully that at one point he walked to the closet, grabbed his traveling bag, and tossed it onto a bed that still bore, he noticed, the imprint of Anna’s body The sight was so painful, that outline of his loss, that he spun away from it and yanked open the top drawer of the bureau as if to remind himself that it was all truly determined, that she had taken the pistol and the poison and would almost certainly use them both before the sun rose again on Munich.

He sat down and looked at his watch and was forced to confront a reality that slashed at him with all the violence of a physical attack, and as the minutes passed, he discovered that he simply could not allow his last sight of her to be wreathed in the shadowy darkness of his room, could not permit the last physical impression he would have of her to be the rumpled sheets where she’d lain.

On the wave of that decision, he leaped to his feet and headed out of his room, then down the corridor toward the elevator. He had to see her one last time, he told himself. He had to hold her one last time. This simple moment of final physical contact he wanted more ardently than he had ever wanted anything.

He reached the eighth floor minutes later, strode down the long hallway, then knocked at her door.

“Anna,” he called softly when there was no answer.

He waited, then knocked again and again, and when there was still no answer, he went to the hotel lobby, so dazed by the need to see her, hold her, that he could do nothing but stand at the window and search the street outside, waiting for her to return.

He would never be sure of how long he waited, only that time itself seemed a malicious force that was relentlessly pressing him toward inestimable loss.

And so an hour might have passed, or two, before he saw Anna strolling back toward the hotel, and then the black car that suddenly drew up to the curb beside her. Four men got out.

They approached her unhurriedly, and the tallest of them removed his brown hat as he spoke to her. She nodded toward the hotel as if in answer to a question, and Danforth immediately shrank back into the lobby of the building so as not to be seen.

For a time, the man in the brown hat continued to question her, the other men now drawing in more closely as if expecting her to bolt away. At one point she reached into the pocket of her dress and drew out her passport, which the tallest of the men examined with a quick, desultory air, as if it were only a formality.

Then, almost like dancers,, two of the men took her quite gently by the arms, one on her right, the other on her left, and in that formation, with the tallest in the lead and a fourth man behind her, they began to move toward the hotel.

The gun, Danforth thought. If they found it in her room, she would be doomed.

He raced up the stairs, bounded to her door, stepped back, and then with far more force than he’d ever applied to anything, he kicked open the door, rushed inside the room, and searched until he found the pistol in the third drawer of her bureau. Now, he thought as he sank it into his pocket, she is safe. No, she was more than safe; she had come close to discovery, and because of that closeness she would be forced to abandon the plot, as would they all. With that thought, what was to be the last great joy of his life swept over him, a surging happiness, fierce and dazzling, that he would never know again.

He was halfway out the door before he remembered the cyanide. He raced back into Anna’s room, glanced about until he saw it sitting completely uncovered beneath her bedside lamp, snatched it from its place, and pressed it hurriedly into the pocket of his jacket.

The elevator was rising toward the eighth floor. He could hear it clattering upward. He would not be able to reach the stairs before it arrived at the landing. There was nothing to do but continue down the corridor. He had gone nearly all the way down it before he heard the rattling sound of the elevator door opening, just around the corner.

The men turned the corner just seconds before Danforth reached it, Anna now held stiffly by the two men at her sides. Her eyes met his as they drew toward each other. They were without sparkle and gave no hint of recognition as she swept by him. He might have been a traveling salesman for all her features betrayed, just another nameless man in a world filled with them. He kept his pace steady as he continued toward the elevator, and he did not look back when he reached the end of the corridor, just turned the corner, as he knew she wished him to, and also as he knew she wished him to, he vanished from sight.

On the street, for the first time in his life, he had nowhere to turn. There was nothing his money or his family could do for him. He was without means, without connections, powerless save for the pistol he’d snatched from Anna’s room and which he now thought he should get rid of, and on that thought he hurried over to a nearby wastebasket and tossed it inside.

Now what? he asked himself in silent frenzy.

He had no idea what Anna was being asked, or of what she was being accused, but he knew that interceding might only deepen whatever suspicions had already been aroused.

He thought of Bannion and decided to go to him. It was not a long walk to the building where he’d rented a room, but when Danforth reached it, he saw another black car pulled up beside the curb in front of it, as well as two men stationed at the entrance of the building.

There was a small park across from the building, its grove of trees his only place of concealment, and so he quickly took a seat on one of its benches, careful to face away from the building, but glancing toward it from time to time. He had no idea what to do now, and it seemed to him that he’d come to Bannion in a state of total confusion, expecting that by some miracle the two of them could find a way to help Anna escape the peril she was in.

He heard a vague commotion and turned back toward the building. Bannion was being led to the car, and even from a distance Danforth could see that he’d not gone quietly. One eye was nearly swollen shut, and blood trickled from his nose. For a time, he slumped, almost casually, against the wall. Then, as if seized by a sudden stiffening of will, he straightened himself, sank one hand into the pocket of his trousers, and with no hint of hesitation, brought that same hand to his mouth.

“Herr Danforth?”

He turned to find a tall man standing before him accompanied by two other men, all of them in long leather coats.

“I am Gustav Volker,” he said. “Gestapo. There are some questions we’d like to ask you.”

“About what?”

“Would you come with me, please?” Volker said, and with a nod he ordered the other men to take up positions to Danforth’s left and right. “I’m sure you can explain everything, Herr Danforth.”

Danforth glanced back toward the building. A knot of men had now gathered around where Bannion lay face-up on the sidewalk, his body utterly still.

“This way,” Volker ordered, and he jerked Danforth around. “Please.”

He tried to remain entirely calm as he was escorted to the car, but once they were inside Gestapo headquarters, he felt the old terror creep over him. He had no doubt that they’d brought him here because they’d discovered the plot and were looking for him to confirm what they already knew. He recalled the earlier “interrogation” Bannion had ordered carried out, all the pain he’d endured, how near he’d come to breaking before it had been abruptly halted.

That had all turned out to be a ruse, of course, but this was not a ruse, as he well knew, and they would stop at nothing, and in the end, he knew that he would break, that their names would spill from him, along with every element of the plot.

He reached into his jacket pocket as unobtrusively as possible, fingered the folded handkerchief and retrieved the tablet that had been meant for Anna.

Later it would seem to him that his decision had come not because he feared torture or that he might break under it, but because it offered the only way to bring their deepest suspicions to himself and thus divert them from Anna. They would find no pistol on Anna, after all, or in her room. They would find no cyanide tablet save the one crushed between his teeth. He knew that his death was no guarantee of her escape, but it offered the only slender service he could render her, and as he placed the tablet between his lips and then bit down, he felt that surge of ancient knighthood he’d read about in books. This he would do for the woman he loved, the only act of true sacrifice he had ever known.

“Herr Danforth.”

Danforth turned toward Volker, the severed tablet in his mouth. Why, he wondered, had he not yet felt the slightest effect of the cyanide? He was by no means a student of lethal poisons, but he’d heard that this one acted almost instantly.

“Come in,” Volker said.

Danforth followed him into the office, expecting to collapse at any moment, his body rocked by seizures during the few seconds it would take for him to die.

“Sit down, Herr Danforth,” Volker said.

Danforth did as he was told.

“Allow me,” Volker said, and before Danforth could stop him, he lit a cigarette and handed it to Danforth.

“Now,” Volker said as he opened the folder on his desk. “Let us proceed.”

During the next few minutes Danforth waited for the cyanide to kill him until it became clear that whatever he’d bitten into had not been cyanide at all. By then Volker was well into his interrogation, and Danforth had learned that there was not a single element of the plot of which he was unaware save that Danforth had known of it.

“We are told she is a Jew and we know her companion is a Communist,” Volker said, “but we know you are neither, and your father assures us that you are not a political person.”

“My father?” Danforth asked.

“Your father, yes,” Volker said. “We contacted him when we learned of your association with this woman — her real name is Klein, I believe?”

“Why would my father tell you anything about her?”

“Because your father has been a great friend to Germany for a long time, Herr Danforth.”

“A friend of Germany?” Danforth asked hesitantly.

“He shares many of our beliefs, as I’m sure you know,” Volker said. “That the Reds must be stopped and, of course, that the Jews are a poisonous tribe.”

Danforth felt the last grain of the fake cyanide dissolve beneath his tongue. “I see.”

“He sends you his best regards, by the way,” Volker added. He absently glanced through the papers in the folder. When he looked up it was clear to Danforth that something darker was on his mind. “It is because your father has been such a friend to us that we are — how shall I say this? — overlooking your associations.” He closed the folder. “We have more than enough information to detain you, Herr Danforth, but we see no reason to keep you from leaving Germany as soon as possible.” He leaned forward with a force whose violent threat could not be mistaken. “You will be leaving our country very soon, is that not so, Herr Danforth?”

Danforth nodded.

“Very soon,” Volker added pointedly “At once, in fact.”

This was an order, of course, and one about which no appeal would be tolerated. In no uncertain terms, Danforth was being spared because he was young and stupid, young and not a Jew, young and not a Communist, and most of all because he was young and the son of a man who hated both Communists and Jews. His father’s support of those who would destroy those groups had reached out to save Danforth’s life.

“You have been granted much good fortune,” Volker told him in a voice that was not unlike his father’s. “Be careful how you use it.” He reached into the drawer of his desk, took out the passport that had earlier been taken from him, and returned it.

“Thank you,” Danforth said. He reached to draw it from Volker’s hand and then stopped as Volker’s fingers clamped down on it.

“At once,” Volker repeated.

“Yes,” Danforth said.

Volker released the passport and Danforth placed it in his jacket pocket.

Neither bothered to say goodbye.

Once dismissed, Danforth headed down the stairs and into the building’s lobby. It was an ornate affair, with the sort of woodwork that had been the pride of an older age, now almost entirely covered in bunting, the interior festooned with Nazi flags.

A car waited outside the building, and as Danforth came into the daylight again, the driver quickly pulled himself from behind the wheel and opened the back door. “This way, sir.”

He was driven — or was it escorted — back to his hotel, and once they were there, the driver again got out and opened the door for him. “I am to wait for you, sir.”

“Wait for me?”

“You are going to the train station, yes?” the man said. “You are leaving Germany today?”

So he would be watched at every step of his departure, Danforth realized, and after he was gone, his name would be added to a list of people no longer permitted to enter Germany.

“Yes, leaving,” Danforth said quietly.

He took the clattering old elevator up to the fourth floor, packed his bags, and headed for the door. He had nearly reached it when he turned back and saw Anna’s scarf still draped over the chair where she’d left it the night before. It was all he would ever have of her, he thought, and in the despair that swept over him at that moment, he drew it from the chair and buried his face in its dark folds and felt in the grimly merging way of grief the full and unbearable weight of both her presence and her loss.

~ * ~

Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

So what was really the point of Danforth’s story? I wondered in the brief silence that fell over him now. Was it a cautionary tale about the profoundly unsmooth running of true love? Or was it a warning about the twisting course of intelligence work, how plots evolve and deepen as if by their own volition, each step in some way unwilled? Could it be that I was being lectured — however metaphorically —about the passion of youth or the fierce nature of desire? Or did his instruction touch on the injustices of class, the way his own favorable circumstances had protected him from what had no doubt befallen Anna and Bannion?

I was still considering these many possibilities when Danforth’s question brought me up short.

“You’ve never killed anyone, have you, Paul?”

He asked this casually, as he might have asked if I’d ever eaten duck confit or sipped Meursault.

“Killed anyone?” I was obviously taken aback by the question. “No, I’ve never killed anyone.”

“I didn’t think so,” Danforth said.

So was Danforth’s tale a murder story? I wondered now.

“Have you?” I asked him, hesitantly.

“Oh, sure,” Danforth answered calmly, revealing no sense of regret at having done so.

“Really?”

“Well, there was a war, after all,” Danforth said.

“Oh, you mean in the war,” I said with rather obvious relief. “Of course.”

“I remember one fellow,” Danforth went on in the same breezy tone, as if he were relating the story of a camping trip in the Berkshires. “A British intelligence officer. He’d tracked this Nazi bastard to a hunting lodge in Bavaria. He knew his crimes. The Nazi tried to explain himself, tell him why he’d done what he’d done, but in the end, he couldn’t keep that mask in place, and with all the contempt in the world, he sneered at my British friend.” He lifted his hand to get the waiter’s attention, then quite casually, he added, “So the Brit shot him right between the eyes.” He laughed. “The British did a lot of that sort of thing after the war, you know. We wanted trials, we Americans. We wanted due process. But not the Brits. They shot those Nazi bastards wherever they found them. They shot them in barns and animal stalls. They shot them in the woods and on deserted roads. They shot them in their little town squares and dragged them out of basements and root cellars and caves and shot them in broad daylight, with their fat wives and little milkmaid daughters looking on.” His laugh was surprisingly brutal. “There are certain things a human being cannot do and still expect another human being to let him live.” He looked at me with the weariness born of this conclusion. “For certain crimes, there should be no protection. Even love, as they say, must have an end.”

I found something curiously touching in this last remark, perhaps because it had been so hard won, given the failure of the plot, how heart-struck he’d been by Anna, their one night of passion, her capture the next day, Bannion’s too, then Danforth’s own escape, along with whatever dark and bloody things he’d known after that, a whole world at war. It made for the grave mosaic one saw in his face and that returned me to his time.

And yet, suddenly, he laughed. “The Old Bulldog,” he said. “It was Churchill who wanted them shot without trial, you know, those Nazi bastards. He had been in a war, you see. Roosevelt had not. Do you think that might have made the difference?”

“That, along with the fact that England had been terribly hurt and we hadn’t been,” I said.

“The Germans would have flattened the whole of England if they could have,” Danforth said. “And even as it was, Canterbury Cathedral was lost and much of London was in ruins.” He shook his head. “To see the fires burning in your own land. That fills a man with rage. And add to the bombings those other German crimes. The camps and the pits. Those bulldozers.” Something in his soul appeared to sour. “We should have killed them all, don’t you think, Paul?”

“I can certainly understand the rage,” I said, then added a short, admittedly nervous laugh. “Of course, my father would never have been born.”

“Nor you,” Danforth said, “So it was good for you that something stayed our hand.”

I felt a chill, as if a wintry blast had stopped me. “Yes,” I said, then glanced at my notes to avoid the icy probing of Danforth’s eyes. “So, I suppose you left Munich that day?”

“I left Germany that day,” Danforth said.

The events of that morning returned to me, Anna’s capture, Danforth’s attempt at suicide, the evidence that would have been found on him had he succeeded.

“Anna’s scarf,” I said suddenly. “What did you do with it?”

“I left it in my room,” Danforth answered. “What, Paul, did you expect me to keep it as some sort of love token?”

“I suppose I did,” I admitted.

Danforth laughed. “You’ve seen too many movies.” He was quiet for a time, then he said, “I expected you to ask me about the cyanide.”

“What about it?”

“Why it didn’t work.”

“Yes, I should have asked about that.”

He waved his hand, “Not to worry. I was well on my way to England before I asked it myself. Sitting on the ferry, thinking everything through again. Not just the events of that last terrible day in Munich, but everything. Clayton’s first approach. Anna in the Old Town Bar. LaRoche. Bannion. Everything we’d shared and endured, all of which had come to nothing.” He shrugged. “And of course that last night with Anna. Then her arrest and Bannion’s. The fact that I wasn’t arrested at all. Then, suddenly, I thought of the cyanide, that it hadn’t worked.” He smiled. “It just came like a soft creak into my mind.”

I expected him to go on from there, follow the linear line of his tale, but he stopped instead, abruptly stopped, as if some quite different progress had suddenly occurred to him. Then, as if deciding to take an alternative route through well-known terrain, he said, “A soft creak. Yes, it came to me just like that.” He paused again, his eyes on his empty glass. “A soft creak,” he repeated. When he looked up at me, his eyes sparkled icily in the room’s dim light. “Like a nightingale floor.”

~ * ~